How do you map the wiring of an entire brain when neuroscience is simultaneously drowning in data and starving for the right kind? Partha Mitra explains why he left theoretical physics to build a whole-brain mesoscale connectome , and what it reveals about the gap between data richness and genuine understanding. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast series. In this episode, Partha Mitra describes the paradox at the heart of modern neuroscience: half a million abstracts published on PubMed each year, yet no comprehensive wiring diagram for any mammalian brain beyond C. elegans. Trained as a theoretical physicist, Mitra recounts how his growing humility toward the complexity of the brain drove him from abstract modeling to the lab bench, where he now leads an industrial-scale neuroanatomy project at Cold Spring Harbor Labor ...