Some estimates suggest that if current technology were used, it would take years to map the roughly 10, 000 synapses that branch from just a singleneuron.
Boyden and Forest, working with Forest's graduate student Suhasa Kodandaramaiah, developed a robotic system to record activity of a singleneuron in the living brain using a tiny glass tube.
If television produced the global village, the Internet produces the global psyche: everyone keyed in like a neuron, so that to the eyes of a watching Martian we are really part of a single planetary brain.