Earlier this year, Harvard neuroscientist
Van J. Wedeen and colleagues published
a Science paper
saying that brain white matter 'wiring' is organized in a grid-like fashion, with sheets of fibres crossing each other.
As Ed Yong put it, that the brain is full of Manhattan-like grids.
However, they were wrong - and that neat grid structure was purely an artefact of the method they used. So say London-based critics Marco Catani and colleagues in a Technical Comment just published.
Catani et al argue that the analysis
Wedeen et al used was unable to distinguish two crossing fibres, unless the angle between them was very large, i.e. close to a right angle. In other words, they only saw right angles - and hence neat parallel sheets - but the other angles were still there.
They present some data of their own, showing the distribution of fibre-crossing angles in 10 healthy brains:
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