Updated Brain Map Identifies Nearly 100 New Regions

Updated Brain Map Identifies Nearly 100 New Regions
The brain looks like a featureless expanse of folds and bulges, but it’s actually carved up into invisible territories. Each is specialized: Some groups of neurons become active when we recognize faces, others when we read, others when we raise our hands.

Understanding the amazingly complex human cerebral cortex requires a map (or parcellation) of its major subdivisions, known as cortical areas. Making an accurate areal map has been a century-old objective in neuroscience. Using multi-modal magnetic resonance images from the Human Connectome Project (HCP) and an objective semi-automated neuroanatomical approach, scientists delineated 180 areas per hemisphere bounded by sharp changes in cortical architecture, function, connectivity, and/or topography in a precisely aligned group average of 210 healthy young adults. They characterized 97 new areas and 83 areas previously reported using post-mortem microscopy or other specialized study-specific approaches.

Read the article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/21/science/human-connectome-brain-map.html?_r=0

Paper:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature18933.html

#neuroscience   #research   #HCP   #brainpacellation