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One In 80 Billion, Adrienne Mueller, 2019
There are approximately 80 billion neurons in the human brain and they are extremely varied in their shape, connectivity and actions. In the primate (human and nonhuman alike) cerebral cortex - the area most people think of when they imagine a 'brain' - the vast majority (up to 80%) of neurons are pyramidal neurons. These are pyramid-shaped neurons that communicate across short and long distances by 'exciting' their targets. Another class of neurons are those that inhibit their targets. These neurons are much more sparse, but exert a powerful influence on the neurons they communicate with. This image shows two such neurons - visualized by bathing them first in a substrate that recognizes a protein unique to these cells and then in a second, fluorescent, substrate that recognizes the first.
Adrienne Mueller is a neuroscience post-doc at Stanford. She studies how dopamine affects neural circuits that contribute to attention. She completed her PhD at the University of Washington, where she studied motor learning in a very specialized brain structure called the cerebellum. As an undergraduate, she worked in a deep brain stimulation lab trying to understand how electrodes placed deep in the brain help people with Parkinson's Disease.
