It's not so easy to get location-specific neurons from humans. It's easy to target specific regions in the mouse brain, getting electrical readings from neurons in a particular part of the visual cortex. That will become increasingly important as the Institute continues mapping not just mouse neurons, but human ones. “The idea is that if everyone does things in a very standard way, we’ll be able to incorporate that data seamlessly in one place.” “In future releases, we’ll be working with other people to get data from other areas of the brain,” says Ng. And while the data for this first set of mouse neurons was primarily generated at the Institute, those shared techniques will make future work more applicable to the BRAIN Initiative’s larger goals. The Allen Institute, in collaboration with other major neuroscience hubs-Caltech, NYU School of Medicine, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and UC Berkeley-has made sure to use the same electrical tracing technique on all of the neurons studied so far (they call it “ Neurodata without Borders”). It’s the first milestone in the Institute’s 10-year MindScope plan, which aims to nail down how the visual system of a mouse works, starting by developing a functional taxonomy of all the different types of neurons in the brain. Now, the Allen Institute for Brain Science, a key player in the BRAIN Initiative, has launched a database of neuronal cell types that serves as a first step toward a complete understanding of the brain. In the US, the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative hopes to, in its own nebulous way, map the dynamic activity of the noggin's 86 billion neurons. In the UK, Henry Markram-the Helen Cho to Elon Musk’s Tony Stark-is leading the Human Brain Project, a $1.3 billion plan to build a computer model of the brain. In the past few years, neuroscientists have embarked on several ambitious projects to make sense of the tangle of neurons that makes the human experience human, and an experience. It’s a long, hard road to understanding the human brain, and one of the first milestones in that journey is building a … database.