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A New Look at How Our Brains Are Organized (5 of 6)

Caption: The grid structure of the brain fiber pathways is shown in multiple regions of the rhesus monkey brain. The rhesus is an old-world monkey with a highly complex richly folded brain, often taken as a close but simplified model of the human brain. The view is from above and to the side. In each region, parallel fibers in two directions are shown in contrasting colors. They cross like the warp and weft of a fabric to form a highly curved, approximately rectangular grid. These grids in different regions merge continuously to form a single highly modified continuous 3D grid, encompassing most or all of the fiber pathways of the forebrain. This video relates to a paper that appeared in the March 30, 2012, issue of Science, published by AAAS. The paper, by V.J. Wedeen at Massachusetts General Hospital in Charlestown, MA, and colleagues was titled, "The Geometric Structure of the Brain Fiber Pathways."

Credit: Video courtesy of Van Wedeen, MGH Radiology, Harvard Medical School

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