 Brilliant's Audio presents the unabridged recording of Connectome, how the brain's wiring makes us who we are. By Sebastian Song, performed by McLeod Andrews. To my beloved mother and father, for creating my genome and molding my connectome, introduction. No road, no trail can penetrate this forest. The long and delicate branches of its trees lie everywhere, choking space with their exuberant growth. No sunbeam can fly a path torturous enough to navigate the narrow spaces between these entangled branches. All the trees of this dark forest grew from one hundred billion seeds planted together. And all in one day, every tree is destined to die. This forest is majestic, but also comic and even tragic. It is all of these things, indeed, sometimes I think it is everything. Every novel and every symphony, every cruel murder and every act of mercy, every love affair and every quarrel, every joke and every sorrow. All these things come from the forest. You may be surprised to hear that it fits in a container less than one foot in diameter, and that there are seven billion on this earth. You happen to be the caretaker of one, the forest that lives inside your skull. The trees of which I speak are those special cells called neurons. The mission of neuroscience is to explore their enchanted branches, to tame the jungle of the mind. Neuroscientists have eavesdropped on its sounds, the electrical signals inside the brain. They have revealed its fantastic shapes with meticulous drawings and photos of neurons. But from just a few scattered trees, can we hope to comprehend the totality of the forest? In the seventeenth century, the French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal wrote about the vastness of the universe. Let man contemplate nature entire in her full and lofty majesty. Let him put far from his sight the lowly objects that surround him. Let him regard that blazing light placed like an eternal lamp to illuminate the world. Let the earth appear to him but a point within the vast circuit. Sample complete. Ready to continue?