The new word connectome was recently coined to indicate a complete description of the physical wiring of the brain.
The United States government, through the National Institutes of Health, has recently kicked off a five year Human Connectome Project that funds a number of laboratories and institutions with the ultimate goal of describing the physical wiring of the human brain.
There are many technical hurdles to get over before the end goal is reached but there are a number of exciting recent advances that should provide interesting and useful results in the near term while providing the foundation for achieving the ultimate goal at some point in the future.
Take a look at some of the images of brain tissue using BrainBow technology:
http://www.google.com/images?q=brainbow
Other related blog posts:
Brain Research Using Online Data Repositories: Network Structure of the Brain
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[…] Papers describing early results from connectome projects are beginning to be published (see my earlier blog post “Mapping the Brain’s Connections: the Connectome“). […]
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