Secular Café: Simple Brain Wiring: emergent complexity

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Simple Brain Wiring: emergent complexity Apr 16th 2012, 01:53 http://theness.com/neurologicablog/i...-brain-wiring/ A fascinating article at Neurologica blog. A snippet to get you hooked.... Quote: Recently neuroscientists published the results of the most detailed scan of brain wiring to date. They are taking advantage of a new MRI installed last fall at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) – the Connectome diffusion magnetic resonance imaging scanner – the most powerful MRI scanner of its kind that can apparently image brain wiring with 10 times the resolution of other MRI scanners. Van Wedeen, M.D., who is heading this research, says that while older scanners could see about 25% of the brain's wiring, this new more powerful scanner can see about 75%. Also, this scanning can take place in minutes instead of hours, which is much more practical for scanning a living creature. What the researchers found is that the primate brain's wiring appears to be much more simply organized than suspected. Rather than a complex tangle of connections, they found a regular grid pattern. The grid is three dimensional – axons from brain cells seem to turn at right angles only, either left-right or up-down. There are no diagonal fibers

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