Connectome: How The Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are
Science has long struggled to pinpoint where, precisely, our uniqueness resides. A connectome is a map of connections between a brain’s neurons, and connectomics is the use of brain imaging and technology to increase the speed and efficiency of those maps. Your brain contains a million times more connections than your genome has letters. Finding the complete neuronal connectome of a human brain is one of the greatest scientific and technological challenges of all time. Seung’s goal is to compare connectomes between normal brains and disordered brains, which would reveal what’s behind brain disorders. If he and his team succeed, it could reveal the basis of personality, intelligence, memory, and mental disorders. Many scientists speculate that people with anorexia, autism, and schizophrenia are “wired differently.” This research has the potential to completely rock our understanding of the brain.
Speaker Details
Sebastian Seung studied theoretical physics with David Nelson at Harvard University and completed postdoctoral training with Haim Sompolinsky at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He serves as Professor of Computational Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Department of Physics at MIT, and Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Before joining the MIT faculty, he was a member of the Theoretical Physics Department at Bell Laboratories. He is also External Member of the Max Planck Society, and has been a Packard Fellow, TED speaker, Sloan Fellow, McKnight Scholar, and PopTech Science Fellow.
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- Speakers:
- Sebastian Seung
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Jeff Running
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