Connectome science is supposed to be the most advanced effort to understand how the brain works, but the research has come up short in what it should deliver: what the human mind is. Understanding how the brain works, simply, as a biological organ, is not the missing piece in the unknowns for several functions of the brain.
Mental health, mental disorders, consciousness, addiction, memory, emotions, regulation of internal senses, and so forth are mind domains. The question is really about how the human mind works.
It is unlikely that there will be any progress to understand the mind directly, by continuing to photograph the brain, for wires. This makes connectome research as an endeavor to understand the mind null, even in an era that AI seems to be emerging with what appears to be some mind. Several parts of connectome research, like the identification of new cell types, structures and so forth could be useful, but to make headway for how the mind works will exceed what connectome currently is.
There are lots of reports about connectomics that it is advancing towards how the mind or thoughts work, this is totally inaccurate. Connectome has been unable to state what the mind is, within the cranium, even theoretically, its components and mechanisms. This too has not been identified anywhere else, usefully.
There is a recent [April 18, 2025] report, MIT’s McGovern Institute is shaping brain science and improving human lives on a global scale, stating that, “Equally transformative has been the McGovern Institute’s work in neuroimaging, uncovering the architecture of human thought and establishing markers that signal the early emergence of mental illness, before symptoms even appear.”
No, MIT’s McGovern Institute did not uncover the architecture of human thought. They did not also make progress against mental illnesses in a way that is currently useful. If someone is thinking about something, what is the difference between the memory of that thing and the thought of it? How do thoughts switch? Why can the thought of something be responsible for a feeling or an emotion? Any architecture of human thought could answer these questions. They did not. Also, if it is possible to find early signs of mental illnesses, how does that inform a bifurcated view of the mind for mental order and mental disorder, to place conditions?
Neuroimaging, as their basis, does not reveal the workings of the mind, in a way that can isolate components, their interactions, relays and attributes. The latest iteration of connectome research also answers none of these or shows any promise.
There is a recent [9 April 2025] interactive in Nature, The MICrONS Project, stating that, “An unprecedented dataset of high resolution anatomical images of individual cells in mouse visual cortex, mapped on to their responses. This integrated view of function and structure lays a foundation for discovering the computational bases of cortical circuits. Nevertheless, the goal of studying millimetre-scale volumes of brain in such detail started to come closer after a period of intense focus on new neuroscience technologies in the 1990s and 2000s. This period led to tools to label, trace and image the activity of neurons in increasingly large populations. However, the fundamental problem of scale remained. A complete reconstruction of a cubic millimetre of neurons requires roughly a petabyte of data. Tracing the intricate branches of the neurons is far too time consuming to do by hand, so improved tools for automation were needed. A parallel revolution in computing — increased computing power and advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence — suddenly made those challenges tractable.”
It is theorized that the human mind is the collection of all the electrical and chemical signals, with their interactions and attributes, in sets, in clusters of neurons, across the central and peripheral nervous systems. Simply, the human mind is the set[s] of signals.
Their interactions result in functions, and the states of the signals at the time of the interactions result in attributes, grades or extents for those interactions. There is no condition in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-5-TR), that these cannot be used to explain.
It can also be used to explain all labels associated with the brain like attention, intent, subjectivity, memory, and so forth. Any neuroscience research that cannot seek out the human mind for what it is or might be, is not a science that is likely to be pivotal to many of the current unknowns.