A roadmap for mapping every synaptic connection in the human brain within ten years.
In this preprint, Moritz Helmstaedter — Director at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research — lays out a roadmap for obtaining a complete human connectome at synaptic resolution within the next decade: the technical, methodological, and infrastructural steps the field would need to take to reconstruct the full wiring diagram of a human brain, neuron by neuron and synapse by synapse.
Connectomics at this scale is one of the foundational milestones for neuroscience, NeuroAI, and whole-organism emulation. A complete, synapse-resolution map of human neural circuitry would provide ground-truth structure for understanding computation in the brain and for building biologically grounded models of intelligence.
The paper was published on Zenodo in April 2026 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
Read the paper: via DOI (10.5281/zenodo.19697470) · Download PDF