Rosenbaum and his collaborators published a new paper in Nature titled “Functional connectomics reveals general wiring rule in mouse visual cortex” (https://www.nature.com/
The data set is the first of its kind in which scientists were able to measure both the activity and the connectivity of a large population of neurons. This combination allowed Rosenbaum and his collaborators to study the relationship between neural activity and neural connectivity in a brain at an unprecedented scale. Analysis of the data revealed a like-to-like wiring rule: Neurons that tend to be active at the same time are also more likely to be connected to each other. Rosenbaum helped demonstrate that similar connectivity structures emerge in artificial neural networks trained to recognize images, implying a functional role for the connectivity structures discovered in the mouse brain. The study improves our understanding of the intricate connectivity structure of neurons in the brain, and how it contributes to neural function.