First detailed map of brain activity reveals decision-making in mice
An international collaboration of scientists has shared the first detailed map of brain activity in decision-making in mice. The resource is open to all and could lead to new knowledge about how the brain works.
Brain-wide map showing 75,000 analysed neurons lighting up during different stages of decision-making in mice.
Credit:
Dan Birman / International Brain Laboratory
Licence: All Rights Reserved
4-minute read
4-minute read
How do we make decisions, and which parts of the brain do we use? It’s a complex and long-unanswered question. Now, scientists at the International Brain Laboratory (IBL) have mapped the entire neural activity of decision-making in mice which could lead to answers.
Their findings, published in two papers in Nature, show that decision-making involves coordination between many brain regions.
This is the first time anyone has produced a whole brain activity map of individual neurons, with previous maps only showing parts of the brain. It could improve our understanding of how the brain works which, in future, could be useful for treating cognitive disorders.
The IBL is a collective of neuroscience labs in Europe and the United States. They standardise experiments and openly share data, software and tools. We’ve funded the IBL since it launched in 2017, in partnership with the Simons Foundation, supporting its pioneering model of collaborative science.
“We can now start to understand the complex brain-wide sequence of events behind the countless decisions made all day, every day,” says Georgina MacKenzie, Directed Activities Research Lead in Wellcome’s Discovery Research Team.
“This project is an excellent example of how supporting discovery research, open science and large-scale international collaborations allows us to answer big questions. I’m excited to see what else we can learn from this dataset and the potential impact it could have on health.”
A global effort to understand how we make decisions
Researchers across 12 labs studied mice while carrying out decision-making tasks. They measured their brain activity using 669 Neuropixels probes, advanced electrodes that we invested in alongside other funders.
Over half a million neurons from 279 brain areas were recorded, representing 95% of brain volume in mice.
The tasks were also designed to help researchers learn how prior expectations of an outcome influence decision-making. Their findings have been published in two papers:
A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour
The first paper found that there isn't one specific part of the brain that’s used in decision-making. This challenges traditional models of brain function, which describe a hierarchical flow of information. It shows that decisions involve dynamic interaction between multiple brain regions.
Brain-wide representations of prior information
The second paper shows how decisions are influenced by prior expectations or knowledge of a task. These beliefs are encoded in areas of the brain related to cognition and the processing of sensory information and control actions. This changes our understanding of how the brain processes information. It could in future help researchers better understand conditions like schizophrenia and autism, which are thought to be linked to how the brain processes expectation.
Dr Anne Churchland, Professor of Neurobiology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and one of the core members of IBL, says: “The efforts of our collaboration generated fundamental insights about the brain-wide circuits that support complex cognition.”
This is a major step forward because researchers usually analyse one or two brain areas at a time, explains Dr Churchland. “My hope going forward is that both our scientific discoveries and our new insights on reproducibility will have an impact in the field,” she says.
Collaborative research and open data facilitate impactful results
This research presents not only a scientific achievement, but also an achievement for improved research culture.
Neuroscience research like this is usually carried out by individual labs. The labs use different methods to study different responses and perform different analyses. This can lead to findings about the brain that lack cohesion.
The IBL’s approach challenges this traditional model because it uses the same experimental design to produce a single dataset across multiple labs.
“The brain-wide map is undoubtedly an impressive achievement, but it marks a beginning, not the grand finale.”
Their brain activity map is publicly available and already being used by scientists to uncover new knowledge.
This – along with the IBL’s plans to explore a broader range of neuroscience questions – will lead to more discoveries.
“The brain-wide map is undoubtedly an impressive achievement, but it marks a beginning, not the grand finale,” says Tatiana Engel, Associate Professor at Princeton University and a core member of the IBL. The scientists at the IBL have achieved something that no single lab could reach alone, she says.
"Now, the next horizon is to extend this collective expertise to the entire community.”
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