CAMBRIDGE — When Sebastian Seung read that each day people around the world spend 600 years collectively playing Angry Birds, he saw not a huge waste, but a big opportunity.

Seung, a professor of computational neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thought that if he could divert even a fraction of that attention to a game with a loftier goal, he could help create the “connectome” — a map of the vast number of connections in the brain that underlie vision, memory, and disease.