How Do Brains Work?
Let's Explore the Brain's Super-Highways!

The Big Question: What does a piece of the human brain look like if you zoom in 100,000 times?

What Scientists Did: Scientists took a tiny speck of human cortex (smaller than a sesame seed!) and sliced it into 5,000 ultra-thin sheets—each 1,000 times thinner than a human hair. They took 150 million microscope photos and used supercomputers to build the most detailed 3D human brain map ever seen!

The Big Question: How does a fruit fly dodge a flyswatter, do aerial acrobatics, and smell sugar from across the room with a brain the size of a poppy seed?

What Scientists Did: Through the global FlyWire project, hundreds of scientists and citizen volunteers traced all 140,000 neurons and 50 million synapses of the adult fruit fly brain. They discovered special "ring-shaped" steering circuits that act like the fly's internal compass!

The Big Question: How do scientists trace millions of tangled brain wires without spending 10,000 years doing it by hand?

What Scientists Did: They created Flood-Filling Networks (FFNs) and deep learning algorithms. The AI robot starts inside a single cell and "pours digital paint" that fills up only that exact neuron, dodging cell walls and following branches in 3D!

The Big Question: What was the very first creature whose entire brain wiring was completely mapped?

What Scientists Did: In 1986, Sydney Brenner and his team spent over 15 years cutting a 1-millimeter worm named C. elegans into thousands of slices, printing physical photos, and tracing all 302 neurons and 7,000 synapses by hand with colored pens!

The Big Question: Can playing a 3D puzzle game help discover new brain circuits?

What Scientists Did: Sebastian Seung and team created EyeWire, an online video game played by over 250,000 people from 145 countries (including thousands of students and kids!). By playing 3D coloring cubes, players mapped dozens of new retinal ganglion cells that detect motion!