EyeWire is a game that helps scientists map the brain. Image: EyeWire Players try to figure out how tangled sets of neurons connect to each other. Image: EyeWire Scientists know very little about how cells in the brain connect to one another. Image: EyeWire The data you produce during gameplay doesn't just get you on a leader board—it's actually used by scientists to build a better picture of the mysterious human brain. Image: EyeWire Mapped J-cells. Image: EyeWire A fully-mapped cell. Image: EyeWire EyeWire is not easy. As you can see, I need a little practice. Image: EyeWire

I’m no neuroscientist, and yet, here I am at my computer attempting to reconstruct a neural circuit of a mouse's retina. It’s not quite as difficult and definitely not as boring as it sounds. In fact, it's actually pretty fun, which is a good thing considering I'm playing a videogame.

Called EyeWire, the browser-based game asks players to map the connections between retinal neurons by coloring in 3-D slices of the brain. Much like any other game out there, being good at EyeWire earns you points, but the difference is that the data you produce during gameplay doesn't just get you on a leader board—it's actually used by scientists to build a better picture of the human brain.

>There's a huge bottleneck in the lab’s research around image analysis.

Created by neuroscientist Sebastian Seung’s lab at MIT, EyeWire basically gamifies the professional research Seung and his collaborators do on a daily basis. Seung is studying the connectome, the hyper-complex tangle of connections among neurons in the brain.

More specifically, right now Seung and his researchers are reconstructing neural circuits in the retina to get a better idea of how humans perceive directional motions. So for example, when you see something that causes you to look up or down, it's believed that there are certain cells that respond to that stimuli.

Seung and his group aren’t exactly sure how those cells work or how they're connected to one another, but they’re trying to find out. “Sebastian likes to say, ‘If we don’t understand how something as simple as motion perception works, how are we going to be able to answer these higher level questions like what happens in learning or mental disorders?’” says Amy Robinson, creative director of EyeWire. The brain is science’s version of the wild west—it’s basically uncharted territory that is waiting to be explored and discovered.

But even figuring out something as seemingly simple as motion perception is incredibly time consuming and has led to a huge bottleneck in the lab’s research around image analysis. Robinson says it currently takes the lab around 50 hours to reconstruct one neuron, even with help from artificial intelligence. Multiply that by the 85 billion (the approximate number of neurons in a human brain), and you can see how they might need some help.

Turns out, citizen scientists are very good helpers. Humans are more adept at spotting the patterns of neuron connectors than most machines are, which is why every player's moves are recorded and fed to artificial intelligence to help machines get better at this very task. Since EyeWire’s public launch in December, more than 70,000 people have played the game. In total, they’ve colored in more than a million 3-D neuron cubes (each cube represents a tiny chunk of brain), resulting in the mapping of 26 whole cells.

“It takes players about three minutes on average to complete a cube,” says Robinson, “So they’ve spent an equivalent of six years of time on EyeWire since the launch.” In the grand scheme of the brain, 26 cells might not seem like much, but that's a testament to the game's emphasis on accuracy (anywhere from five to 25 people will trace the same set of connectors before it's deemed valid).

Still, Robinson wants the number of players, the time they spend on EyeWire, and consequently the number of cells mapped, to increase. In order to do that, the EyeWire needs to be fun, which is not an easy feat when your raw material is neuroscience.

>Robinson would like EyeWire to be as enthralling as a first-person shooter.

So how can you design a game about neuroscience to be as addictive as a game like Angry Birds? The short answer is, you really can’t. At least not without sacrificing accuracy and efficiency. “We haven’t done the best job of making it a viral game interface,” Robinson admits. She’s right. EyeWire is not Candy Crush. The current interface looks like a game you’d play in your biology class, and it takes a lot of practice to get good at it.

Other science-minded games that suffer from these problems too. Foldit, a game developed by the Center for Game Science at Washington University that asks players to help solve the mysteries of protein folding, is a brilliant way to use gameplay to tackle a scientific question, but not exactly something you'd play to unwind after a long day at work.

The EyeWire team is constantly striving to make EyeWire as engaging as possible. Seung’s lab recently began collaborating with Kevin Slavin, a professor at MIT’s Media Lab with a background in game design and development. Robinson says developers are working to make EyeWire open source so they can take it to hackathons and say, "Here's what we’ve built so far, how would you just totally smash up and remix this game? What would it look like?"

Ideally, Robinson says she'd like EyeWire to be as enthralling as a first-person shooter game, though she acknowledges neuroscience as a subject matter does have its limitations. "EyeWire is a great game, but it doesn’t compare to World of Warcraft,” she says. “I think a lot of people play because it’s being a part of something bigger than yourself.”

The next big push is to enable multi-player mode, which she hopes will help turn EyeWire into a massive online gaming community. "These are the kinds of things we now have to consider when we’re doing science," she says, referring to the intricacies of game design. "Because, you know, our lab depends on these players. We can't do our research if they’re not playing."

An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that EyeWire is a game to map the human brain. It's actually a game that maps a mouse's retina. Don't worry—they'll get to the human brain soon.