Scientists successfully chart entire brain activity during the process of decision-making for the very first time.
Breaking News: Researchers Unveil Comprehensive Map of Decision-Making in Mice Brains
In a groundbreaking development, a team of international researchers has successfully mapped decision-making at a single-cell resolution across an entire mammalian brain in mice. This monumental study, published in the prestigious journal Nature, offers a comprehensive view of distributed neural networks in action.
Led by three Princeton labs, the study involved 75,000 neurons activated across the mouse brain during a decision-making task. The experimental setup was unique, with mice controlling shapes on a screen using tiny steering wheels. Some circles were faint, forcing the mice to rely on past experience, providing researchers with a window into expectation-driven decision-making.
The study, a first of its kind in neuroscience, was a collaborative effort between 22 labs, including the International Brain Laboratory (IBL). Alejandro Pan Vazquez, Ph.D., a contributing author, noted that this was the first time such a large collaboration had ever been done in neuroscience.
Traditional neuroscience studies often focus on small clusters of neurons in isolated brain regions. However, this study, which pooled data across labs, aimed to capture the complexity of decision-making in the brain. Ilana Witten, Ph.D., a neuroscience professor at Princeton University, was involved in the study and stated that many brain regions, rather than just one or two, contribute to decision-making.
The findings of the study reveal that decision-making activity is widely distributed, including in regions traditionally associated with movement rather than cognition. Witten further added that one of the important conclusions of the work is that decision-making is indeed very broadly distributed throughout the brain.
The study used a standardized approach to track neural activity during behaviour, with each lab focusing on a specific brain region using high-density electrodes that monitored hundreds of neurons simultaneously. Tatiana Engel, Ph.D., another researcher involved in the study, stated that the brain-wide map marks a beginning, not the grand finale, and highlights the power of large-scale neuroscience.
The study produced datasets covering more than 600,000 neurons across 279 brain regions in 139 mice, providing a unique dataset describing what the dataset is composed of, what it looks like, and offering a resource for the field to use for further analyses.
The International Brain Laboratory has shown how a global team can push each other beyond comfort zones into uncharted territories no single lab could reach alone. This collaborative effort serves as a significant step towards understanding the complexities of the brain and decision-making processes.
