What are you thinking? Researchers at NeuroSpin won’t read your mind, but they do want to know how it works. The new facility near Paris will study the brain at previously untapped spatial and temporal scales.
Neurons can currently be probed a million at a time using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), or by the dozen with electrical recordings. “We want to address the middle scale—clusters of 1000 to 10 000 neurons,” says founding director Denis Le Bihan, who holds a PhD in physics and a medical degree and is the driving force behind NeuroSpin. Going to higher MRI field strengths, he adds, will sharpen the resolution by about a factor of 10, from a few millimeters to hundreds of micrometers and from one second to hundreds of milliseconds.
“The beauty of MRI,” Le Bihan says, “is that we have not reached the physical limits of the technique. That’s not...
