The new science of connectomics

This five-minute video introduces you to some incredible research into the structure of the brain. Starting with a very simple creature - a nematode worm - scientist were able to trace the connections or 'wiring diagram' between all 302 of its neurons. They have now started on a much-bigger project: mapping the visual system of a mouse. The video shows how painstaking analyses of tiny slivers of a mouse retina have enabled them to show how cells selectively respond to moving light and how those cells project onto cells in the visual cortex. The goal is to study not just the connections as a fixed structure but the activity of those connections in a living and working brain.

What comes across very clearly is just how astonishingly complex even the mind of a little mouse is and how there is so much work to do. Students of the mind-body problem familiar with the many 'gap' arguments purporting to show the irreducibility of mental to physical phenomena might wonder whether our ignorance of the workings brain does make the gap an epistemic one of understanding rather than the claimed fundamental one in nature.