A Huge New Data Set Pushes the Limits of Neuroscience

There’s a video that’s shown in almost every introductory neuroscience course. In the prefrontal cortex, the region at the front of the brain that plays major roles in planning, decision-making, and social behavior, neurons respond to such a diversity of things—visual features, tasks, decisions—that researchers have been unable to assign them any particular role, at least individually. One centimeter long and made of silicon, a single probe can listen to hundreds of neurons at once and is small enough that neuroscientists can stick several of them into an animal’s brain. At the Allen Institute, a nonprofit research institute started by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, they used six Neuropixels probes to record simultaneously from eight different regions of the mouse visual system. As the largest data set of this kind ever collected—three times as big as the previous record holder—the release lets researchers observe enormous groups of neurons acting in concert.