SNT: A Unifying Toolbox for Quantification of Neuronal Anatomy

SummaryQuantification of neuronal morphology is essential for understanding neuronal connectivity and many software tools have been developed for neuronal reconstruction and morphometry. However, such tools remain domain-specific, tethered to specific imaging modalities, and were not designed to accommodate the rich metadata generated by recent whole-brain cellular connectomics. To address these limitations, we created SNT: a unifying framework for neuronal morphometry and analysis of single-cell connectomics for the widely used Fiji and ImageJ platforms.We demonstrate that SNT can be used to tackle important problems in contemporary neuroscience, validate its utility, and illustrate how it establishes an end-to-end platform for tracing, proof-editing, visualization, quantification, and modeling of neuroanatomy.With an open and scriptable architecture, a large user base, and thorough community-based documentation, SNT is an accessible and scalable resource for the broad neuroscience community that synergizes well with existing software.

How Authors Think about Their Writing, Dictating, and Speaking

A recent study (Gould, 1978) showed that adults, after a few hours practice, dictate one-page letters of various complexities as well as they write them. This was true for time to compose and for quality of the resulting letters as judged by outside raters. These results are contrary to the common assumption that dictating requires a long time to learn. Why then do people not dictate more often? This study tested the hypothesis that authors just learning to dictate believe their written documents to be superior to their dictated documents. To test this, adult subjects, after being trained to dictate, composed letters of various complexities, sometimes writing them and sometimes dictating them. They were required to rate a letter's quality three times: immediately after composing it, after receiving it back from the typist and proof-editing it, and two weeks later. The results confirmed the hypothesis: subjects initially rated their written letters superior to their dictated letters, but subsequently both they and others (“recipients”) rated them as equivalent.