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Brain connections laid out like city streets, scientists find

By Carolyn Y. Johnson

 |  Globe Staff  

  March 29, 2012

The brain is crisscrossed by neural highways that follow a grid-like pattern, much like ordered city streets that intersect at right angles, according to new research. “Basically, the overall structure of the brain ends up resembling Manhattan, where you have a 2-D plan of streets and a third axis, an elevator going in the third dimension,” said Van Wedeen, a physicist and radiologist at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital.

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