Scientists have defined it as a map, but it is rather messy to orient yourself. A very intricate network. If we were to imagine a psychedelic journey in our brain, it would be very close to the photographs put online (for free) by Google and created by Harvard scholars. Colors, knots, connections, links, filaments… It may make you smile that our brain – real, perfectly functioning – resembles an amazing fantasy. It may also make you smile that to obtain this image another intelligence was needed, the artificial one. Who may not have understood the extent of the mission, but gave us an extraordinary gift: a cubic millimeter of our cortex, taken from the anterior temporal lobe, shown in 3D. In total, fifty thousand cells and 150 million synapses (connections, in fact). The neurons that seem to float between thin threads. Axons, which transmit signals to neurons. The six layers of the cortex, a bit like those drawings of the earth's layers in school books. And then some surprises: neurons connected in a special, very tight way, by as many as 50 synapses; lumps of axons, mysteriously scattered here and there; pairs of mirror cells, engaged, who knows why, in a dance of symmetries in our gray matter.
A wonderful chaos reigns over everything (perhaps only apparent, perhaps perfect): a network of plots, connections, which are so reminiscent of life.
A map in which to get lost is the only way to search for meaning.