About This Project

A connectome is a map of the network of neural pathways in a brain - and everybody's is unique. In many ways, you ARE your connectome. Until recently, no one has had the ability to map it. With your connectome in hand, you can do awesome things - like own a handy backup of your brain. Happily, technologies are beginning to be developed to do this amazing task. Brain Backups is developing innovative, novel, and exciting technologies to do this very thing! Wouldn't you like to have a Brain Backup?

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

The brain is a fascinating biological machine, capable of tasks which have not yet been possible to replicate by any engineering efforts. How did something this complex emerge? How does it store information so reliably? How does it use its information to make judgements? Questions like these underlie our fascination with the brain, and to begin to address these questions requires data from the brain's layout itself. That data is the connectome. The connectome allows us to begin to see how the brain is both wired and organized, how the information it contains is stored and protected, and how it "talks" both to itself and to the external world.

Our longest-range goal is to map individual connectomes so you can backup yourself. Welcome to the future.

What is the significance of this project?

Mapping the connectome is a first step towards curing many diseases and health issues involving injury to the brain. This includes Alzheimer's Disease (a variant of this is now believed to be the cause of Robin William's death), Parkinson’s Disease (PD), dementia, coma, stroke, memory loss due to traumatic brain injuries, concussion, anoxia, hypothermia or even normal age-related memory loss.

When connectomic information is readily available, technologies we are developing will allow recovery of functional brain circuits from individuals. From a known connectome other information would be recoverable as well, including memory pathways that may have been damaged, attenuated, mislabelled, or are otherwise unrecoverable.

What are the goals of the project?

We will study assemblies of virtual and actual neurons, ranging in size from 300 to 500,000 cells. These generate patterns which we will characterize. Recognition of robust motifs in the dataset will help identify characteristics of the overall connectome.

Current neuronal models add up synaptic input to reach a firing threshold for each neuron. We know that's not the whole story - significant local computations also occur at the dendritic spines, far from the axonal hillock. Therefore, existing models are incomplete.

Our parameterized paradigm is a novel approach in this area of theoretical neuroscience. Starting with our model equation, we will derive parameters empirically. This completely new model will be open-source, revolutionizing theoretical neuroscience.