Thursday, July 19, 2012

Scientist’s game helps map the brain

http://articles.boston.com/2012-07-16/business/32685087_1_brain-neurons-cell-networks


CAMBRIDGE — When Sebastian Seung read that each day people around the world spend 600 years collectively playing Angry Birds, he saw not a huge waste, but a big opportunity.
Seung, a professor of computational neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thought that if he could divert even a fraction of that attention to a game with a loftier goal, he could help create the “connectome” — a map of the vast number of connections in the brain that underlie vision, memory, and disease.

This spring, the physicist-turned-neuroscientist and his team launched EyeWire ( eyewire.org), an online game that aims to harness the energy of people working as volunteer “scientists” to build 3-D maps of the cell networks that are crucial for vision.

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