Aakriti Jaiswal | May 13, 2024
The Google research team developed advanced AI tools to construct an interactive 3D Model of the brain tissue. The model shows how complex the human brain is. Describing just this small sample — one-millionth of the total human brain and about 3 mm long — requires more than a million Gigabytes of data: 1.4 Petabytes.
This image shows a closeup of all of one type of neuron — the excitatory neuron — coloured by size with red largest and blue smallest. The cells are about 15-30 micrometres across at their core.
An intriguing finding in the reconstruction was the existence of clusters of cells that tended to occur in mirror-image orientation to one another. This image shows a particularly symmetric pair.
This single neuron (white) has more than 5,000 axons (blue) arriving from other neurons to bring signals — and at least that many synapses where the signals cross from the axon to the receiving neuron. The synapses are shown in green.
A surprising finding of this research was the occurrence of “axon whorls.” Axons (blue) are the filamentous part of a nerve cell that carries a signal away from the cell. These looped piles of axon were rare in the sample, and in some cases, they sat on the surface of another cell (yellow).
This image shows all of the axons that can tell it to fire (green) and all of those that can tell it not to (blue). Multiply this by the whole brain.