Big Brain Project

Researchers in Germany and Canada have produced a new map of the human brain which is considered to be fifty (50) times as detailed as the best previous effort. A human brain was sliced into 7400 sections and photographed at the microscopic level.

This is not the same as the brain initiative from the Obama administration, which seeks to show the connectivity of the brain and the expression of genes. However, this massive new exemplar of the brain will be significant in the following ways:

• It will give researchers additional information as to where to look in smaller regions of the brain for specific deficits, especially those found in TBI.

• New relationships between different parts of the brain inner-connectivity will be established.

• These anatomical breakthroughs will be able to be matched up with functional information (which parts of the brain light up during different activities on functional MRI).

• New structures can be found.

The increasingly minute looks we can now have at the human brain are getting us ever closer to seeing the often “invisible” cellular damage suffered after so called “mild TBI.”