It was an easy decision for J. Galen Buckwalter, a 69-year-old quadriplegic living in Southern California, to undergo a craniotomy in 2024. The operation, which involved inserting 384 electrodes in his brain and a large titanium plate in his skull, allows researchers to record data about how his neurons operate, potentially helping future paralysis patients. The hard part, Buckwalter says, has been giving up the right to access and own his neural data and feel assured that it will be kept priv
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In a feat that seemed unachievable just a few short years ago, an international research consortium has recently unveiled the first complete wiring diagram of an entire fruit fly brain. The map itself is accompanied by a cache of papers, demonstrating how this breakthrough is already leading to new scientific findings and there’s much more to come.
Why do we need brain maps anyway? Maps that show every neuron in a brain and all the myriad connections between them are called connectomes. The fi
