Last year, I blogged about a new and very pretty way of displaying the data about the human 'connectome' - the wiring between different parts of the brain. But there are many beautiful ways of visualizing the brain's connections, as neuroscientists Daniel Margulies and colleagues of Leipzig discuss in a colourful paper showcasing these techniques. Here, for example, are two ways of showing the brain's white matter tracts, as studied with diffusion tensor imaging (DTI):
Another striking image is this one, a representation of the brain's functional connectivity - the degree to which activation in each part of the brain is correlated with activity in every other part. The functional connectome is inherently difficult to visualize in 2D (or even 3D), but in this ingenious display, the brain's surface is shown covered with hundreds of little brains, each one a colour-coded map of the connectivity from that particular point:
The ...
