"When I first got involved in neuroscience," explains Alex Protopapas, "I was under the false impression that the brain was a jumble of neurons arranged in seemingly random ways that we would never make sense of -- there was no way we could think about it in a rigorous way. But many brain areas and most of our cortex are organized in a modular fashion: Cells are connected to each other in a particular way and that circuit of neurons is repeated throughout a particular brain area. So we can do more rigorous analysis by using computer modeling. And what we learn from this may also help us develop conceptual frameworks for thinking about neuroscience."

--Linda Marsa