Gaming the System

Thanks to high-powered microscopes, researchers are now able to spy on individual nerve cells (neurons) and map out the connections between them. But that’s a tricky and painstaking task if you’re dealing with 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion connections in a whole human brain. To speed up the process, scientists have called in help from a quarter of a million video gamers to map out the twisted connections between more than 3,000 nerve cells. They’re playing Eyewire, a game using real imaging data gathered from a small sliver of nerve tissue taken from the back of a mouse’s eye. So far the players have discovered several entirely new types of cell and made detailed maps of connections between neurons, including this one between a ganglion neuron (blue) and a starburst amacrine cell (yellow), showing that you don’t have to work in a lab to help out with vital science.

Written by Kat Arney

Image by Alex Norton, Eyewire

Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

Image copyright held by the original authors

Research published in Cell, May 2018

Crowdsourcing Brain Mapping with Gaming Helps Identify 6 New Neuron Types

The neural maps were developed by Eyewirers, members of an online community of video game players who have devoted hundreds of thousands of hours to painstakingly piecing together these neural cells.