Free Will! at the Disco

How does a three pound ball of flesh inside your skull lead to your thoughts, your hopes, your feelings...and your sweet dance moves? There are more cells in your brain than there are people on Earth. Billions of neurons making trillions of connections. Trying to figure out how your brain works would be like trying to understand every conversation that’s going on in the world, all at one time…ten times over!

So how can we tackle this monumental task?

Most scientists simplify the problem by focusing on a single part of the brain, but what if we took a different path? What if we could understand everything that’s going on in a brain, all at the same time?

In this episode, Saul Kato explains how he’s doing just that.

Learn more about Saul Kato's work here: http://profiles.ucsf.edu/saul.kato

Follow Saul on Twitter: @neurotheory

Watch a worm brain in action!

The video shows multiple dots, which are each a 3D representation of the activity all the neurons in a single worm. Many of these "neural space" dots are present in the video, each showing the neural activity of the same worm at different times. With multiple dots shown together in this video allow you to see that the worm's "neural space" shows a similar repetitive pattern that sometimes diverges (in this video the divergence seen is when the worm took a left turn or a right turn).