Wanna Play? Computer Gamers Help Push Frontier of Brain Research

"People can get pretty addicted to computer games. By some estimates, residents of planet Earth spend 3 billion hours per week playing them. Now some scientists are hoping to make use of all that human capital and harness it for a good cause."

"Right now I'm at the novice level of a game called EyeWire, trying to color in a nerve cell in a cartoon drawing of a slice of tissue. EyeWire is designed to solve a real science problem — it aims to chart the billions of nerve connections in the brain."

"'There's no way the professional scientists alone can analyze all of that,' says Sebastian Seung, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 'We need people to help us.'"