This Is the First Time Scientists Have Seen Decisionmaking in a Brain

"Neuroscientists from around the world have worked in parallel to map, for the first time, the entire brain activity of mice while they were making decisions. This achievement involved using electrodes inserted inside the brain to simultaneously record the activity of more than half a million neurons distributed across 95 percent of the rodents' brain volume. Thanks to the image obtained, the researchers were able to confirm an already theorized architecture of thought:"

"To illuminate all the regions involved in this decisionmaking process, the team trained mice to turn a small steering wheel to move circles on a screen. If the shape moved correctly toward the center, the animal received sugar water as a reward. After running this experiment with 139 mice across 12 labs and monitoring their brain activity, the experiment managed to map 620,000 neurons located across 279 brain regions, with a subset of 75,000 well-isolated neurons then being analyzed."

An unprecedented complete-brain neural map captured simultaneous activity of hundreds of thousands of mouse neurons during decision tasks. Electrodes recorded over 620,000 neurons across 279 regions, with 75,000 well-isolated units analyzed, covering roughly 95% of brain volume. Mice learned a steering-wheel visual task for sugar water rewards while activity across multiple areas coordinated to produce decisions, demonstrating that decision-making emerges from distributed, integrated brain-wide processes rather than a single localized center. The dataset enables more advanced analysis of neural pathways underlying complex cognition and is publicly accessible as a resource for further research.

Read at WIRED