“With the help of volunteers who played an online brain-mapping game, researchers showed that pairs of neurons positioned along a given direction together cause a third neuron to fire in response to images moving in the same direction,” writes Mo Costandi in an article for Nature about how MIT researchers have mapped neuron connections in the brain.
In a piece for The Guardian, Mo Costandi reports on how MIT researchers have mapped neural connections in the retina. “A large group of gamers, working with computational neuroscientists, has produced a wiring diagram of the nerve cell connections at the back of the eye, which may have solved the long-standing question of how cells in the retina detect motion,” Costandi writes.
Boston Globe reporter Carolyn Johnson writes about how MIT researchers have mapped a neural circuit in the eye that helps detect movement. The researchers developed the map through EyeWire, a citizen science game developed at MIT that has users trace the path of neurons in the brain.
Klint Finley, a reporter for Wired, reports on Open Ephys, a project for sharing open-source neuroscience hardware designs founded by MIT and Brown University researchers.