One of the mysteries in neuroscience is how tools that capture relatively few components of brain activity have allowed scientists to predict behavior in mice, while much of the complexity of a mouse brain is “irrelevant background noise,” says Rockefeller University physicist Alipasha Vaziri.

In 2021, Vaziri’s lab developed light-beads microscopy (LBM), which enabled a 100-fold increase in the number of neurons that could be simultaneously recorded.

Recording one million neurons

The researchers have now recorded the activity of more than one million neurons across the entire cortex of the mouse brain for the first time. Animals were observed by multiple cameras from different angles.

The researchers used LBM in combination with advanced data analysis, computational modeling, and machine learning techniques to study the neural activity of mice as they spontaneously moved and reacted to their environment.

A brain observatory

LBM will be used in the Rockefeller Brain Observatory, a new initiative spearheaded by Vaziri to make pioneering, commercially unavailable instruments accessible to neuroscientists “that can do things that are otherwise impossible,” Vaziri says. 

Vaziri and his team are also helping researchers at several universities, including at Stanford University and UCL-London, to replicate LBM technology in their own neuroscience labs. The data they’ve amassed from the current study is also available for analysis by other researchers.

Citation: Jason Manle et al. Simultaneous, cortex-wide neuronal population dynamics reveal unbounded scaling of dimensionality with neuron number up to one million neurons. Neuron. March 06, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2024.02.011

Let us know your thoughts! Sign up for a Mindplex account now, join our Telegram, or follow us on Twitter.