The Human Connectome Project: discovering our brain in depth

The goal of the Human Connectome Project is to understand the connections of the healthy human brain to establish a baseline that helps identify connectivity abnormalities in brain disorders.

The Human Connectome Project (HCP) was launched in July 2009 as a great challenge of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) plan, endowed with 21.3 million euros for five years. The main objectives of this project are:

Provide a compilation of neural data. Provide an interface to graphically navigate this data. Draw conclusions never before made about the living human brain.

According to Hagmann: “To understand how a network works, you must know its elements and their interconnections (…). The connectome will greatly increase our understanding of functional emerging processes from brain structures and provide new insights into the mechanisms the brain uses if brain structures are damaged.”

Now, before moving forward: what is a human connectome? It is a mapping of the connections between the neurons of the brain. Therefore, with this project what is sought is build a network mapping on connectivity at both anatomical and functional levels of the brain. That is, the aim is to know in detail all the brain circuits and their synapses.

Furthermore, not only that, but it is also intended to produce a set of data that facilitates research into different brain disorders.

“None of your neurons know who you are… Nor do they care about you.”

-Eduardo Punset-

What is the aim of this project?

Currently, the National Neuroscience Research Plan of the National Institutes of Health is launching a $30 million project that will use cutting-edge brain imaging technologies to map the circuits of the healthy adult human brain.

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By systematically collecting brain imaging data from hundreds of people, the Human Connectome Project (HCP) will provide insight into how brain connections underlie brain function and will open new lines of research for human neuroscience.

“In the human mind, the number of possible connections that can be made between neurons is far greater than the number of atoms in the universe.”

-Alan Moore-

Recent data and research

Until now only one connectome is known: that of a nematode (cylindrical worm). Its modest nervous system consists of 300 neurons. In the 1970s and 1980s, a team of researchers mapped its 7,000 interneuronal connections, that is, its connectome. Obviously, the human being is much more complex, since it has more than 100 billion neurons and 10 thousand times more connections.

New research from HCP team members suggests that brain circuits are organized more like the street network of Manhattan than London’s chaotic tangle of random paths. That is, in the same way that the map of Manhattan forms a perfect grid, our neural network is also ordered and aligned, instead of being tangled as previously thought.

Several recent findings based on neurovisualization data from the Human Connectome Project and psychological data show that individual differences in brain connectivity can reliably predict a person’s behavior.

Thus, it is thought that, in the future, Such scans could help doctors make the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders much more personalized, as argued by the authors of these discoveries.

“Neurons are cells with delicate and elegant shapes, the mysterious butterflies of the soul, whose beating of wings who knows if one day will clarify the secret of mental life.”

-Santiago Ramón y Cajal-

Conclusions and curiosities about the Human Connectome Project

The brain continues to be a complex organ that is the focus of attention of many scientists when doing their studies, even for some it is still a black box about which little is known. For this reason, the Human Connectome Project It is a good initiative, since try to clarifywith the best technological tools at your disposal, the functioning of the brain and its neuronal connections. In this way, we can eradicate many mental disorders.

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Today, scientists know that many mental disorders, like schizophrenia, they are connectopathies; that is, diseases in which brain wiring is abnormal. That is why we want to create a map of the human brain to help cure diseases such as epilepsy in the future, since by knowing its framework we will be able to act.

Finally, if you are curious, At this link you can see an interesting interactive viewer that interprets the connectivity matrix data from the conference publication Anatomical structural network analysis of the human brain using partial correlations of gray matter volumes. Anand A. Joshi, Shantanu H. Joshi, Ivo D. Dinov, David W. Shattuck, Richard M. Leahy, Arthur W. Toga.