View our Twitter (X) feedView our Youtube channelView our Instagram feedView our Substack feedView our Spotify feed Mapping the brain won’t unlock all its secrets. In an excerpt from her new book, Circuit Breakers, Anna Chambers explains how brain-mapping research leads to more questions than answers. Science and TechMind and BehaviorNeuroscienceBiologySynapses Excerpted from the new bookCircuit Breakers: How Neuroscientists Get Inside Your Head by Anna Chambers.
Published by Abrams Press. Copyright © 2026 Ann Chambers. There’s a quote attributed to New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford that goes something like this: “All science is either physics or stamp collecting.” In other words, some scientists perform experiments to explain how things work, while others don’t test specific hypotheses but instead observe the natural world and take note of what they find.
The latter may seem inferior, but don’t underestimate the influence of observational science; after all, biology’s greatest stamp collector was probably Charles Darwin, who planted the seeds of his theory of evolution by natural selection in his detailed field journal published in 1839: _The Voyage of the Beagle_. In neuroscience, two types of stamp collections — wiring diagrams, or _connectomes_, and parts lists, or _cell type atlases_ — are a major focus of time, effort, and financial investment. For example, the adult Drosophila connectome, published on a website called FlyWire.ai, is freely available for anyone to peruse.
Upon its announcement, neuroscientist Sebastian Seung proclaimed in the _New York Times_ that “mind uploading” had hit the mainstream. The entire connectome, minimized to fit my computer screen, looks a bit like the tangled mess I pull out of my hairbrush every morning, except that each strand is color-coded to ease tracing its long, thin processes throughout the structure. Apparently, at least according to Seung, I’m staring at an uploaded mind.
But what does it actually tell me? One is immediately struck by the sheer number of neurons and connections. It’s humbling, given that when I started as a student of neuroscience, I would blindly record from spiking neurons, one by one.
It felt like trying to understand a whole planet full of people by speaking to one random person at a time. The connectome is a resource, but in and of itself it is not a specific answer to a specific question. Though it took an enormous amount of time, effort, and money to generate it, it’s not necessarily clear what breakthroughs will come of it and what those discoveries will mean for either basic science or human health.
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