Mapping the brain’s superhighways

Mapping the brain’s superhighways: Scientists led by Van Wedeen of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston used a scanning technique called diffusion magnetic resonance imaging that detects the direction of traffic flow along white matter tracts, the brain’s information superhighways. The scans revealed that these brain signals form a grid, made up of parallel and perpendicular tracts woven together into curved sheets.

This grid is a general feature of primate brains, Wedeen and colleagues report in the March 30 Science. Brains of rhesus monkeys, owl monkeys, marmosets and prosimian galagos contained similar geometric patterns to those found in human volunteers, suggesting the grid’s deep evolutionary roots.