I am my connectome: Sebastian Seung’s TEDTalk

You are more than your genes.  So what are you?

Sebastian Seung introduces the connectome at TED with the idea that who you are is a function of the interconnectivity among the 100 billion neurons in your brain. Your connectome, the full set of your neurons and the synapses that link them, has one million times more connections than your genome has letters.

“Finding an entire human connectome is one of the greatest human endeavors of all time,” says Seung. While the completion of this epic quest is still many years in the future, the Seung Lab at MIT is making unprecedented progress through the citizen science game EyeWire.

By playing EyeWire, you contribute to research that may eventually help scientists map and understand how connections among the millions of miles of neurons in a single brain come together to create the thinking, feeling organism we know as a human being.