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How Do Neurons Connect With Each Other?

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Doctor Linqun Luo is a professor here at Stanford and currently teaches neurobiology and does research as the principal investigator in the Luo Lab as a member of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His primary research area is the human brain focusing on neural circuits and how they function, how precise are the connections, how they develop. To this end his lab is using fly and mouse models to study their various circuits, centering mainly on the olfactory, and exploring the early development of neural networks in mammals (Luo Lab Bio). In order to write this commentary on the topic “How do neurons connect with each other”, I have chosen two pieces to read. The first, from Science magazine, outlines the main issues, goals, and paths the world is taking to understand to understand neuroscience including the research being done to answer the question in his topic. The second paper, from Cell Press, is a much more technical paper which outlines one of the pathways Luo isolated in the olfactory cortex of mice and how their neurons may connect. After reading these two papers I am confused on how Professor Luo answered this question in his presentation. The question he poses is not one easily explained or shown and is not even fully answered by scientists yet. In the paper “It takes the world to understand the brain” he writes that the human brain is insanely complex as it contains approximately 10^11 neurons they are linked by 10^14 synapses. He explains how they

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