How Matrix fan mouse helped map our brains

THANKS to a mouse watching clips from The Matrix, scientists have created the largest functional map of a brain to date a diagram of the wiring connecting 84,000 neurons as they fire off messages.

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Using a piece of that mouse's brain about the size of a poppy seed, the researchers identified those neurons and traced how they communicated via branch-like fibres through a surprising 500million junctions called synapses.

The data, assembled in a 3D reconstruction coloured to delineate different brain circuitry and published yesterday by the journal Nature, is now open to scientists worldwide for additional research.