SPACES & PLACES
Citizen Scientists:
How Online Gamers are Helping to Solve the Puzzle of the Brain
All images courtesy of EyeWire.
By Megan Guerber
Contributor
EyeWire has opened up the field of neurosci-
ence in an addictive and entertaining way that
anyone with an Internet connection can access.
Taking inspiration from such viral online games
as Angry Birds and Candy Crush, EyeWire uses
game-driven crowdsourcing to assist with one
of the most complicated, critical, and meaningful quests of our time: mapping the brain.
To date, the human brain remains one of the
greatest mysteries of mankind. This complex
control center is woven from billions of nerve
cells that form an intricate communication network. Many scientists believe that our thoughts
and memories are created within the chemical and electrical impulses that travel therein.
Sophisticated and thorough mapping of the
brain could therefore uncover vital information
about how we think and act. It could unveil the
formation of the self and our identities, helping
us to explain not only what makes us tick but
also who we are. Understanding how the brain
is built, how it functions, and why it operates
the way it does could lead to the improved care
and eventual cure of diseases and disorders such
as Alzheimer’s, autism, and amyotrophic lateral
sclerosis. With that much to gain, why hasn’t
the brain been mapped before? Well, let’s just
say our thinking caps are labyrinthine and perplexing organs. Unlocking them is undoubtedly
one of the greatest and most challenging scientific endeavors of our time.
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To comprehend the mind-boggling complexity of mapping a human brain, it may help to
know that the average connectome, an organism’s full neural network, consists of roughly
100 billion neurons. Add to this the estimated
100 to 1,000 trillion synapses that connect
them, and you start to picture the overwhelming enormity of the project. Some have compared it to the Human Genome Project, a
global collaboration that mapped and identified
all of the genes from the human genome in the
early 2000s. It took 13 years to complete, with
20 universities and research centers throughout
the US, the UK, France, Germany, Japan, and
China contributing government-sponsored sequencing. In comparison, mapping the connectome is vastly more arduous, owing to the fact
that there are 1 million times more neural connections than letters in your genome. Even with
government funding, there is not enough time
and resources to complete this project without
innovative, outside-the-box thinking.
To map a connectome, one must trace all neurons with their long, branch-like connections.
This allows scientists to see how individual cells
function within the larger neural network and
how information is processed in the brain. A
human neuron, typically as narrow as one tenthousandth of a millimeter, has thousands of
synapses that bend and stretch great distances.
Tracing these is much like attempting to follow
a single noodle’s path throughout a giant bowl
SciArt in America June 2015