This is the first time that scientists saw a decision in the brain

Neuroscientists with around The world first worked in parallel with a map, the entire mouse brain as they made decisions. This achievement included the use of electrodes inserted in the brain that more than half of millions of neurons distributed the amount of 95 percent volume of rodent brain.

Thanks to the resulting image, researchers were able to confirm the already theorized architecture of thought: that there is no single region exclusively in charge of the decision and instead is a coordinated process among multiple brain areas.

To illuminate all regions involved in this decision-making process, the team coached mice to turn a small steering wheel to move the circles on the screen. If shape moved properly towards the center, the animal received sugar water as a reward.

After starting this experiment with 139 mice over 12 laboratories and monitoring their brain activities, the experiment managed to map 620,000 neurons over 279 brain regions, with a subset of 75,000 well-insulated neurons, and then analyzed. The resolution of the produced neural folder is unprecedented in the study of the brain and its neural networks during the thinking process. Moreover, it represents a turning point and in terms of the type of observed samples and the scope of covered area of ​​the brain. So far, only the whole brain of fruit flies, the larvae of fish or small sections of complex brains have been transcribed.

Deciding is a holistic process

The results were published in two papers In the magazine of nature. Although scientists are involved to recognize that data are not final, they represent the starting point in the neural decision-making study. The value of this data lies in the fact that the neural path of decision-making is now clearer, which will allow scientists a better understanding of complex thinking abilities and execute more advanced analyzes. In addition, the data set is publicly available.

“These initial conclusions confirm the aspects of the functions of the brain that already been intouched from the available limited studies without revealing,” Juan Lerma, Professor “Juan Lerma,” Juan Lerma, “Juan Lerma.” SCIENCE MEDIA CENTER SPAIN said. (Lerma was not included in the research.) “In short, data show that, for example, in decision-making, for example, many areas of the brain, more than expected, while in the sensory processing areas are different.”

The adult human brain contains about 86 billion neurons, and each is capable of establishing thousands of synaptic connections with other cells. Although weighs about 1.4 kilograms, the human brain consumes about 20 percent of the total energy of the body at rest, extremely high proportions for its size. Although today’s supercomputers exceed the brain in numerical calculations, it still does not correspond to its energy efficiency or its learning capacity, adaptation and parallel processing. It is still a long way before the neuroscience can fully map the neural human decision processes, but studies like this approach us closer.

This article was originally published Wired Spanish and has been translated from Spanish.