Project MindScope: Large Scale Science for Mapping the Mind

The Allen Institute is engaged in a ten year project to study the principles by which information is encoded, transformed and represented in the mammalian cerebral cortex and related structures. The goals of MindScope are to provide a quantitative taxonomy of cell types and their interconnections in visual cortex and associated brain regions, to observe their dynamics under physiological conditions in behaving mice, to construct cellular models of how their dynamics and function arise from the structural description, and to understand how this function relates to visual perception. This is a large-scale, in-house team effort to synthesize anatomical, physiological and theoretical knowledge into a description of the wiring scheme of the cortex, at both the structural and the functional levels. The fruits of this cerebroscope will be freely available to the public.