We Shall Finally Map The Brain - EP 36 Andrew Payne

Core Memory · Oct 1, 2025 · 1h 24m · transcript

In the 1970s, scientists created the first wiring diagram of a worm brain. To do this, they sliced up a worm, imaged the slices under microscopes and then reconstructed a map of the worm’s neurons and their synaptic connections. Wonderful. (It was 302 neurons and really a map of the worm’s central nervous system.)

We haven’t come terribly far since then. It took until 2024 for scientists to create a full map – aka a connectome – of an adult fly brain (140,000 neurons) and researchers now dream of completing similar work for a mouse brain and one day perhaps a human brain with its 80 billion…