Jeff Lichtman
Harvard University
Builder The claim is about what the hardware does, and the philosophy is left open
Jeff Lichtman runs a laboratory at Harvard University focused on connectomics at the ultrastructural level. His laboratory developed Brainbow, a method that colors neurons in distinct fluorescent hues to make their processes traceable, and drove the serial electron microscopy programs that produced the largest dense reconstructions of mammalian and human neural tissue.
His laboratory’s 2024 reconstruction, first authored by Alexander Shapson-Coe, published in Science as A Petavoxel Fragment of Human Cerebral Cortex Reconstructed at Nanoscale Resolution, cataloged about 57,000 cells and 150 million synapses in one cubic millimeter of human temporal cortex across 1.4 petabytes. The dataset found rare but powerful connections, including axo-axonic synapses, that tissue-scale and coarser methods do not resolve.
This site’s Builder category refers to his authorship of that dataset. The reconstruction is a structural instrument for the tissue that generates human experience and a cost statement for whole human connectomics, but it records no neural activity and claims nothing about consciousness. This site covers the result in the petavoxel cortex post.
Known for. Brainbow, senior author of the petavoxel human cortex reconstruction, serial electron microscopy connectomics
Coverage on this site
Related researchers
- Alexander Shapson-CoeHarvard UniversityFirst author of the petavoxel reconstruction of human cerebral cortex
- Matt AngleParadromicsFounder and CEO of Paradromics, developer of the Connexus Direct Data Interface high-data-rate brain-computer interface
- Isabella R. BeckettCoauthor of the MaleCNS preprint comparing male and female Drosophila brain connectomes
- Stuart BergFirst author of the MaleCNS preprint on the male Drosophila central nervous system
- Edward BoydenMassachusetts Institute of Technology, Howard Hughes Medical InstituteExpansion microscopy, optogenetics, connectomics tools for consciousness research
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Sydney BrennerMRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, CambridgeFounding the C. elegans research program, the 1986 connectome, the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
Jeff Lichtman is listed with the other builders, who hold that the claim is about what the hardware does, and the philosophy is left open. The positions themselves are set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.