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Perumal Murugan's one part woman- A powerful rendering of an entire milieu

One Part Woman is a powerful rendering of an entire milieu which is certainly still in existence, which it engages with insightfully. The author handles myriad complexities with sophistication, creating an evocative, even haunting, work. The novel is also acutely sensitive in its approach toward gender and sexuality and humane in its treatment of longing. While fundamentally an emotional work, driven by personal desires and losses, it also unsettles the reader with what it frankly reveals about simplistic ideas about progressiveness. The society in which the book is set in is permissive in ways that the urban middle-class in the same state at large is not, even though known markers of suppression, such as caste laws, hold sway. But, here as elsewhere, the true hindrances to happiness and progress come in much more personal forms.

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GARRET RAJA

The paper is an attempt of the researchers to compare two culturally diverse texts of different countries based on the Ideological standpoint of " Gender Performitivity " of Judith Butler. According to the presupposition of the researchers, Gender has been deliniated based on the the performance or the responsibilities done by the subject, when the victim fails to fulfill these duties, the subject is deemed as unfit to be categorized under the premised Gender. The notion has been furthermore expounded by Germaine Greer in her critical text, The Female Eunuch. The paper furthermore demonstrates the way in which the Gender configurations work and how masculine identity is seen in different cultures. The researchers have also used theories derived from Disability Studies to reinforce the argument. ___________________________________________________________________________ The novels, Lady Chatterley " s Lover and One Part Woman, both are compared based on the common disability of the male characters who fails to provide offspring to their wives. The impairment of impotency is seen in both the cultures as a failure of their gender performance. When the characters fail to do up to their gender role they are seen as an object occupying the space. The discourse of Gender configuration in both the culture is constituted by performing certain duties as husbands. Lady Chatterley " s lover gives a vivid picture of

IJCIRAS Research Publication , Zeba naz

Meghna pant is an Indian contemporary writer, speaker and journalist who has written actively on various issues related to gender inequalities including domestic violence, body-shaming, surrogacy and rape etc. Pant's works include novels, short stories and non-fiction writings. She has also shared her views about the evils of domestic violence on TEDx talks. This research paper is focused on the analysis of Pant's debut fictional novel One and a Half Wife and the issues and dilemmas endured by divorced women in India as depicted in the novel. Expression of identity is an important theme of the novel that has been analyzed in the paper through various details illustrated in the novel. Theory of Feminism is an integral part of the discussion about gender equalities with respect to social, cultural and economic aspects of the society. It aims to provide equal rights and recognition to women in the society. In our patriarchal communities, male gender unequivocally occupy a superior position in comparison to female gender. This paper also aims to show how the identities of women remain veiled in the shadow of their male counterparts.

Sumit Saurabh Srivastava

Navin Patwa

Writings have been a potent weapon for the delineation of ideologies, philosophies and sensitive issues. Feminine writers concentrate on issues pertaining women and their works have thus become an outcry of protest. Kamla Das’ frank treatment of her intimate relationships and experiences, highlight her innocence and surface the web weaved by the Patriarchal institution (family), and the physical-cumpsychological pain and burden on her body and mind. Polie Sengupta: another Indian Writer, renarrates history to defend the accusations on the mythological villains i.e. Shoorpanakha and Shakuni from feminine perspective and colors her narrative in all contemporary hue and color. Dina Mehta: another Indian writer, portrays her Lady Macbeth like female characters with an air of strength, vigor and firm determination. Manjula Padmanabhan: a writer of versatile genius, leaves her plays with an open ending so as to engage the community of readers with their perceptions and views on the concerned issue. Her plays are a sort of resistance against the patriarchal dystopias in which women have fallen on account of the biological differences and the social attitude towards them. Key words- Patriarchy, Dystopia, intimacy.

Daath Voyage

Pallavi Mishra

: Femininity, Womanliness and Motherhood are normative in nature, norms that are suggestive and get reflected consciously or unconsciously through words, gaze, attitude; modes of acceptance and non-acceptance causing fear resulting in conflicts, speculations on being ostracized, traumas and certain truths of social abnegation. Are the norms worth the stolid grief that the women suffer after being labeled, ‘a barren woman’? We are bodies and our bodies are ourselves. We grow, evolve and transform as it grows, evolves and transforms. Throughout our lives we have an unavoidable relationship with the stuff that is our body. We cannot stay separate from our body and the same body can betray, break, mutate, get damaged and disabled at the same time. Where lays the “collective responsibility” of the tribe when it inflicts trauma and suffering for a flaw that is beyond human control? Can disability activism reduce the pain of a barren woman? The acceptance and change in the gaze of the society might create an ambience conducive for her survival. In Perumal’s One Part Woman, a myth interferes, acts as a valid provocative force to renounce barrenness and hold on to life, but in both the situations, the ultimate balance in life is amiss.

THE MAHARAJA SAYAJIRAO UNIVERSITY OF BARODA

BASHIR A H M A D SHEIKH

is one of the novelists, who is concerned with highlighting the hidden thoughts and mindset of women through her novels. Being a postmodern writer she revolts against the age-old orthodox and customary norms of patriarchal supremacy and gives her female characters the same postmodern tinge which they are worthy of. The postmodern woman keeps inimitable qualities that discriminates her from the other class of women. They are open-minded, bold, frank, developing, and fundamental women in search of self-identity. All the female protagonists of the novels of Manju Kapoor possess unique qualities that present them in a different light, prominently different from an ordinary reflection of a woman. They are well talented and are fairly conscious of the changes that take place in society now and then. They struggle for economic independence, choose their life partners, and keenly take part in politics and social work. They struggle tooth and nail to triumph over the traditional stumbling blocks that have been set to haze their identity. The protagonists in the novels of Manju Kapoor are the personification of the post-modern women who fight against male bigotry. Manju Kapoor's Difficult Daughters, Married women, and Immigrant states about both modern and postmodern women. Thus, the paper deals with the study of her characters based on modern and postmodern points of view.

Honey Sethi

Indian writing in English is a relatively-recent phenomena, as far as literature goes. Though one can trace such writers in India to a century back, Indian writing in English has come into force only in the last couple of decades or so. Some of these writers have achieved worldwide fame, some national, and others perhaps have to be content with a more constricted circle. The very definition of the adjective Indian here is hazy. Many of these writers neither live in India, nor are Indian citizens. To get around this haziness, I will cast my net as wide as possible and include all those writers who are related to India be it by origin, or the subject of their writings—whether they admit it or not, whether they like it or not!Indian women novelists have been portraying women in various manifestations. But recently, the remarkable range of India’s most accomplished women writers of post colonial strand has brought a tremendous change in the trend of depicting women characters. Women wri...

Horizons of Holistic Education

Jaspreet Singh

Academic Journal Perspective : Education, Language, and Literature

widya nirmalawati

After post-feminism period, women still have to struggle to be “perfect human being”as her own ideal. It is not only the case for women having no power, intellectualism, and money, but also for ladies with authority and prosperity enabling her own to be an single individual with financial and time freedom. This can be seen in a contemporary literary work, One Indian Girl (Bhagat: 2016), in which an Indian girl having a prestigious position in an American investment bank could not achieve her ideal life. This paper is aimed to reveal the dilemma of a feminist woman in her relation to men and to her family norms and her defeat to the true reality she failed to mediate. Using post-feminist approach, this paper investigated the fictional facts to prove that source of the problems is actually her female being. It is indicated that the problems she had in her life coming from her female feminist. From the very first, it was depicted that she was viewed negatively by her own mother for b...

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One Part Woman by Perumal Murugan review – a skilful Tamil tale

W ith the backdrop of Hindu nationalist fervour gripping India, One Part Woman finds a historical parallel in Rushdie’s Satanic Verses after the infamous fatwa . The story at the book’s core has been similarly overshadowed by offended sentiments and speculation surrounding the author’s future . In Murugan’s case, the Kongu Vellala community, backed by local Hindu rightwingers, claimed the novel showed their religious practices and their women in a bad light.

The novel, set in 1940s Tamil Nadu, is the story of Ponna and Kali, a farming couple whose happiness is marred by their inability to have a child. Ponna is a doting, obedient, subservient wife, the kind who comes running at a snap of her husband’s fingers, and who only exists in the Tamil male imagination. Kali treats her with utmost affection, and has a primal, reflexive desire for her that cannot quite qualify as love.

Seen by society as a “barren” woman, Ponna is insulted and excluded by the community, while Kali is goaded to take a second wife. Twelve years of childlessness are accompanied by thousands of temple visits, prayers, offerings. When nothing yields fruit, the couple are advised to participate in the festivities of a local temple: for one night the norms of society are relaxed, all men are deemed gods and women desiring children are permitted to have sex with strangers. In the leadup to its climax, the artful narrative is as frenzied as a religious festival; present and past come in and out of focus as if to the cue of loud cymbals.

Murugan’s unsurpassed ability to capture Tamil speech lays bare the complex organism of the society he adeptly portrays: the double entendres men use towards Kali affirm their own masculinity as much as they mock him; women employ their only freedom, the freedom of speech, to put other women in their place; and most of all, the unsparing barbs of a judgmental, caste-ridden, patriarchal society alienate a couple longing to be like any other.

Aniruddhan Vasudevan’s idiomatic translation preserves the mood of the original, and serves as a constant linguistic reminder that, as readers in English, we are but visitors to this realistic pre-independence Tamil world. For a book that earned its author death threats and was burned by mobs, One Part Woman is a surprisingly tranquil, sensuous read.

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‘One Part Woman’: The Psychic Burden Of Childlessness And Progeny 

One Part Woman , a novel written by Perumal Murugan and translated into English by Aniruddhan Vasudevan in 2015 was banned for its controversial content as it questions and explores the site of parenthood and caste in society by placing the character Ponna in an otherworldly carnivalesque situation through the traditional chariot festival of Maadhorubaagan.

Perumal Murugan introduces us to the world of a childless couple Kali and Ponna who are continuously hounded by the taunts and insinuations of the community where societal expectations to bear a child take over their love for each other. In the novel Murugan talks about how a man’s worth is determined by his ability to cause morning sickness in his wife in the very second month and a woman’s worth is measured by her ability to reproduce. Their inability to fulfil this role in their community continues to remain in the back of their minds.

“ She was thinking how the tree had grown so lush and abundant in twelve years while not even a worm had crawled in her womb. Every wretched thing reminded her of that lack .” The lack of the woman is traced back to the man, it is almost as if they mirror each other’s lack and are therefore together. 

The anxieties and paranoia that revolve around the lives of Kali and Ponna are ridden by the curse of infertility, the Gounder caste community in the novel believes the land owners have a male child, cattle and orchards of their own – barrenness is regarded as a curse.

The novel is ridden with the pregnant curse that follows the two, the curse isn’t one of infertility but Brahmanical anxieties of land and progeny – in one such scene, Chellappan comes to the barnyard of Kali’s cows as they’ve failed to yield a calf despite two or three mating attempts. He then remarks, “This is just how cows are. No matter what you do, they never get pregnant. Just quietly change the cow ,” – this remark is striking as it alludes to Ponna’s inability to reproduce. The barren woman is replaceable, if she cannot serve the interests of the high-caste man. 

The novel’s first half is the circulation of the Brahmanical claim to the woman’s body, the novel counters narratives of the myth of marriage as a personal and private affair, not only is the household unit an annexation of the state but of caste Hindus in itself, the woman’s body and her liaison with her husband becomes severely visible in the eye of collective deification.

Another instance in the book sheds light on the caste superstitions that lurch over infertile women of the book, Ponna is invited for the puberty ceremony of Chellamma’s daughter – the custom was to ward off the evil eye wherein all the aunts were called to spin red balls of rice in a large circle around the girl’s body and then toss it away. Except when Ponna comes forward to do the same, Chellamma verbalises her anxieties – what if the girl becomes barren too? Was Ponna so inauspicious? 

The novel’s first half is the circulation of the Brahmanical claim to the woman’s body, the novel counters narratives of the myth of marriage as a personal and private affair, not only is the household unit an annexation of the state but of caste Hindus in itself, the woman’s body and her liaison with her husband becomes severely visible in the eye of collective deification. This is when the village folks compel Ponna to attend the festival of Madhorubhagan wherein women are allowed to engage in consensual sex with any man, referred to as ‘ god ,’ to beget children. This child would be considered a gift from god.

Such a ritualistic event defies the conceptualisation of calendric time and opens up an alternative world for women, where a sexual exploit with a lowered caste man would not only not elicit condemnation but the child begotten from this affair could be seen as legitimate, in the eyes of her peers. Ponna’s decision to do so creates a harrowing bridge between the two, Kali’s anxieties of raising a son that isn’t his, and especially, isn’t of his ‘ stature ,’ plagued his hegemonic masculinity- one that is rooted in the groundings of caste and virility.

Kali does not allow Ponna to participate in the eighteenth day of the ritual at Karattur, because he is afraid of her participation with an untouchable. Murugan verbalises this anxiety in the following lines – “ More than half young men roaming about town from the untouchable castes. If any of them gets to be with Ponna, I simply cannot touch her after that. I cannot even lift and hold the child .”

One Part Woman opens and ends with one tree: as the novel closes, Kali is seen considering whether to tie a noose to it, feeling betrayed by Ponna as she returns home pregnant having fulfilled the ritual. This transgression is committed by two non-actors.

The title of the book in itself draws attention as it is directly analogous to Madhorubagan, meaning half male and half female God in the same body but the English title does the job in exposing the lack the desire of Ponna to become a mother – motherhood is seen as the final step to become a complete whole woman. 

The ritual then places her in a trance-like state of both unfamiliarity and morbid mesmerisation, the loosening of caste and gendered ties around the female body even though rooted in the patriarchal cult of pregnant women, Ponna experiences a female desire engulfed by curiosity and repulsion.

As Catherine Kohler Riessman vividly examines the plight of childless women in south India, she writes, “ Women modify their reproductive lives as the need arises. Women grapple with their positions as victims of a culturally constructed subordinate status at the same time as they search for creative ways to resist subordination ,” – Ponna’s life, however, isn’t this black and white, her pursuit of reproducing both her progeny and a world wherein she forms a complete woman, places her in a carnivalesque gathering akin to strange touch, the eccentric lurching pressure of fertility consumes the spatiality of the woman’s life, sexual desire is accentuated and hyphenated here. There is little to no room for her to exercise agency, the agency has already been asserted for her, and all she must do is carry out the mechanisation of picking her ‘ god .’

Perumal Murugan’s One Part Woman dissects the myth that subsumes the ideological consciousness of gendered caste anxieties. In the words of Kalyanaraman, “In the gounders world view, the hard work put in by a Gounder male in his adult life is meaningless if there is no son to inherit the fruit of his labours .”

One Part Woman displays a melange of layers, sliced together into an amalgamation of anxieties, the anxieties around childbearing, the anxieties around marriage and its entrenchment in the woman’s sexuality, the anxieties of Kali revolving around caste-constructed masculinity and the overarching anxiety of negation – the negation of Kali’s identity in the face of a child that isn’t his, a wife that he cannot touch, and a domestic sanctuary that’s tarnished by Ponna’s transgression. The public and the private get enmeshed in the novel as it navigates through a spatially ambiguous world of bodies, gender and caste hegemony. 

Rida Fathima is a twenty-year-old Literature student at Azim Premji University with an interest in literary theory, film criticism, Marxist historiography and oral archives. She is interested in critiquing and analysing media through a feminist anti-capitalist lens.

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Watch CBS News

A look at the growing trend of women becoming single parents by choice

By Nikki Battiste

May 9, 2024 / 7:51 PM EDT / CBS News

New York City — Up against her biological clock, Traci Kodeck faced a tough decision at age 39.

She says she remembered the moment she decided to have a baby on her own.

"I was with my best friend, and I said, 'I don't have a partner, I need to be a mom,'" Kodeck told CBS News.

She emptied her savings to cover fertility treatments, ultimately using sperm donated by a friend. After three years of trying, she had Zola.

"Then it was, 'Oh my gosh, I'm taking home a human.' And she was perfect," Kodeck said.

Kodeck belongs to the organization Single Mothers by Choice. Its 30,000 members are part of a growing trend of women having babies alone because they're tired of waiting for "the one," or they simply want to parent solo, like Emma Ramos, mother to 2-year-old Michael.

She describes her life as a single mother by choice as "beautiful chaos."

As a teenager, Ramos dreamed of having a child, not a partner. Modern attitudes have helped make that possible. According to a Pew Research Center  survey from last year, 78% of Americans find single parenting acceptable. Although more, 93%, support a two-parent household.

"That speaks to the misconception...that we have somehow purposefully handicapped our children by…only bringing them into the world with one parent," Ramos said.

Ramos admits that the responsibility of shouldering the decision-making for her family does come with challenges.

"Decision-making, I would say, is a blessing," Ramos said. "But then, I suppose, if I make the wrong decision, I'm the only one…to blame, I guess."

Zola Kodeck recently turned 11, just in time for Mother's Day.

"Having a single mom by choice can be hard, like when you're first growing up, but then my mom just wanted me, nobody else," Zola said. "…Every day to me is like a Mother's Day."

"Everything I do, I do for her," Traci said of her daughter. "This house is for her. My job, it's all for her."

Nikki Battiste is a CBS News national correspondent based in New York. She is an Emmy and Peabody-award winning journalist, and her reporting appears across all CBS News broadcasts and platforms.

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Women at Work, and With Their Families Too

More from our inbox:, mythologizing trump, mentally ill and in prison, say no to more offshore drilling.

To the Editor:

Re “ An Act of Defiance Can Improve Things for Working Moms ,” by Toby Kiers (Opinion guest essay, May 4):

I am a woman nearing the completion of my B.A. in philosophy, and I have the absurd hopes of going on to get my Ph.D. and work in academia and also have a family.

Dr. Kiers’s essay both shed light on the frustrating reality of the discrimination that mothers face in the world of academic research, and provided a shining beacon of hope to counteract it.

The false binary that women are presented and that so many people (including Dr. Kiers’s own child, she noted) assume is that we must decide: our research, our careers, our academic endeavors, or our children. One or the other.

Dr. Kiers has called this out; this is not actually a choice we have to make. Motherhood is not a detriment to our academic abilities and research contributions; it actually strengthens it in new and unexpected ways.

Dr. Kiers, in her refusal to choose between her research pursuits and her family, is helping to forge an exciting path forward. It is a path to a world where women can be celebrated, respected and supported with all that they are and all that they contribute, including their children.

That is the academic world I hope to enter into someday.

Megan Clancy Washington

Kudos to Dr. Toby Kiers! Her story is shared not only by fellow scientists, but by women at large. I admire her courage in bringing her 3-week-old son to work, and in pondering the advice of an older woman who discouraged her from being self-deprecating.

“What can feel like an inconvenience is often a blessing in disguise,” she writes. Amen to that! As far as detachment and vulnerability creating meaning? I now see vulnerability being valued and detachment being questioned in health care, via narrative prose and poetry by nurses and physicians.

I am a seasoned nurse. This article brought me back to the AIDS epidemic. In terms of science, we really had no idea what we were dealing with. I was on maternity leave and had come to know “brain fog” intimately. I received a call asking if I would open a new department for AIDS. After a day thinking about it, I accepted. My two boys went with me into the wilderness of men dying of a virus we knew little about.

My sons are now 40 and 50. The older one still recounts stories of things he learned and joy he felt at a party that those dying men held for us nurses on Mother’s Day. Vulnerability informing the work? You bet!

Pamela Mitchell Bend, Ore.

Since I am a woman who walked across the medical school graduation stage holding my toddler, while eight months pregnant with No. 2, I can certainly identify with Toby Kiers’s essay about managing a career as a scientist while parenting.

It was extremely trying for me to charge into residency with very small children at home. But I am blessed to have a wonderful husband who loved fathering, and was able to take a sabbatical for some of my residency.

As a result, our two daughters, now young adults, are very close to their father. I think that this is the real win in how things are evolving for women in the workplace. Partners get to join in on the nitty-gritty as well as the glorious moments of parenting.

I do believe I missed out on the sort of lovely parenting my mother gave me as a stay-at-home mom. But I was also able to show our daughters what commitment to an intellectual and humanistic goal looks like.

I certainly think medical residency programs are over the top in terms of workload and emotional toll; this needs to evolve. But I think enjoying the participation of both parents in the up-close-and-personal part of child-rearing makes all of our children stronger.

Susan Ferguson Berkeley, Calif.

Re “ Trump Embraces Lawlessness in the Name of a Higher Law ,” by Matthew Schmitz (Opinion guest essay, April 4):

Mythologizing Donald Trump — either Mr. Schmitz fancifully comparing him to outlaws like Robin Hood, Billy the Kid and Jesse James, who titillated people with their challenges to authority, or Christian evangelicals’ even more far-fetched casting of Mr. Trump as King Cyrus or even Jesus — fails because most of us see him for what he is, a narcissist with no positive agenda and no respect for the law.

If we must make comparisons, it’s to David Duke, the Klansman who ran for president, or Gov. George Wallace, standing in the schoolhouse door to block integration. The only people who saw them as rebels with a cause were themselves defending a lost cause, much like those who flock to MAGA now.

Steve Horwitz Moraga, Calif.

Re “ Inmate’s Death Highlights Failures in Mental Health ” (front page, May 6), about the troubled life and death of a prisoner, Markus Johnson:

As a social worker who has worked in the field of mental health for more than 50 years, I read with interest and sadness yet another article about a mentally ill individual who was not provided with adequate treatment and subsequently died in prison.

This article highlights the failure of deinstitutionalization. It demonstrates how our prisons have become the institutions replacing those that formerly housed the mentally ill. Not only are the mentally ill being ill served, but so too is the public, which is at risk of harm from those hallucinating on the streets.

Our shelter system is also not in a position to manage needed services and supervision. The last resort is a cell. I believe that providing long-term residential programs with highly supervised step-down programs would provide a solution to the tragedies we currently read about daily. Certainly the cost would be less than incarceration.

Let’s look to providing real help rather than punishment for our mentally ill population.

Helen Rubel Irvington, N.Y.

“ Offshore Oil Production Expands as Companies Cite Energy Needs ” (Business, May 10) lays out Big Oil’s plan for the Gulf of Mexico. Let’s be real: We’re in a global climate crisis. The last thing we need is for the fossil fuel industry to expand offshore drilling.

If climate change, rising ocean temperatures and the risk of horrific events like the Deepwater Horizon disaster weren’t enough reason to stop offshore oil expansion, we also know that this industry cannot be counted on to clean up its mess when the wells have run dry.

There is a huge backlog when it comes to plugging defunct or abandoned wells, removing old oil platforms and remediating the seafloor damaged by drilling operations. Oil and gas companies have already littered the Gulf of Mexico with more than 18,000 miles of disused pipeline and over 14,000 unplugged wells , which can leak chemicals like methane into the ocean.

It also comes with financial risks: If offshore oil and gas operators file for bankruptcy (as 37 have done since 2009 ), U.S. taxpayers could be forced to foot the bill for cleanup.

Enough is enough: We cannot afford more offshore drilling.

Andrew Hartsig Anchorage The writer is senior director, Arctic conservation, for Ocean Conservancy.

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• 09 May 2024

Cubic millimetre of brain mapped in spectacular detail

• Carissa Wong

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Rendering based on electron-microscope data, showing the positions of neurons in a fragment of the brain cortex. Neurons are coloured according to size. Credit: Google Research & Lichtman Lab (Harvard University). Renderings by D. Berger (Harvard University)

Researchers have mapped a tiny piece of the human brain in astonishing detail. The resulting cell atlas, which was described today in Science 1 and is available online , reveals new patterns of connections between brain cells called neurons, as well as cells that wrap around themselves to form knots, and pairs of neurons that are almost mirror images of each other.

The 3D map covers a volume of about one cubic millimetre, one-millionth of a whole brain, and contains roughly 57,000 cells and 150 million synapses — the connections between neurons. It incorporates a colossal 1.4 petabytes of data. “It’s a little bit humbling,” says Viren Jain, a neuroscientist at Google in Mountain View, California, and a co-author of the paper. “How are we ever going to really come to terms with all this complexity?”

Slivers of brain

The brain fragment was taken from a 45-year-old woman when she underwent surgery to treat her epilepsy. It came from the cortex, a part of the brain involved in learning, problem-solving and processing sensory signals. The sample was immersed in preservatives and stained with heavy metals to make the cells easier to see. Neuroscientist Jeff Lichtman at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his colleagues then cut the sample into around 5,000 slices — each just 34 nanometres thick — that could be imaged using electron microscopes.

Jain’s team then built artificial-intelligence models that were able to stitch the microscope images together to reconstruct the whole sample in 3D. “I remember this moment, going into the map and looking at one individual synapse from this woman’s brain, and then zooming out into these other millions of pixels,” says Jain. “It felt sort of spiritual.”

A single neuron (white) shown with 5,600 of the axons (blue) that connect to it. The synapses that make these connections are shown in green. Credit: Google Research & Lichtman Lab (Harvard University). Renderings by D. Berger (Harvard University)

When examining the model in detail, the researchers discovered unconventional neurons, including some that made up to 50 connections with each other. “In general, you would find a couple of connections at most between two neurons,” says Jain. Elsewhere, the model showed neurons with tendrils that formed knots around themselves. “Nobody had seen anything like this before,” Jain adds.

The team also found pairs of neurons that were near-perfect mirror images of each other. “We found two groups that would send their dendrites in two different directions, and sometimes there was a kind of mirror symmetry,” Jain says. It is unclear what role these features have in the brain.

Proofreaders needed

The map is so large that most of it has yet to be manually checked, and it could still contain errors created by the process of stitching so many images together. “Hundreds of cells have been ‘proofread’, but that’s obviously a few per cent of the 50,000 cells in there,” says Jain. He hopes that others will help to proofread parts of the map they are interested in. The team plans to produce similar maps of brain samples from other people — but a map of the entire brain is unlikely in the next few decades, he says.

“This paper is really the tour de force creation of a human cortex data set,” says Hongkui Zeng, director of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. The vast amount of data that has been made freely accessible will “allow the community to look deeper into the micro-circuitry in the human cortex”, she adds.

Gaining a deeper understanding of how the cortex works could offer clues about how to treat some psychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases. “This map provides unprecedented details that can unveil new rules of neural connections and help to decipher the inner working of the human brain,” says Yongsoo Kim, a neuroscientist at Pennsylvania State University in Hershey.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01387-9

Shapson-Coe, A. et al. Science 384 , eadk4858 (2024).

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