The findings, which were recently published in Molecular Psychiatry and PLOS ONE, call for a re-evaluation of how scientists study the human brain.

Postmortem brain samples—tissue samples obtained from individuals who donate their brain to science after death—are currently the standard tissue source used by scientists to study how our brains work at the deepest level.

This practice, which is used to study the foundations of virtually all brain illnesses, such as schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease, rests upon the assumption that molecular biology measurements made in the postmortem brain are representative of how the brain works in living people. This assumption had not been adequately tested, so the Living Brain Project was designed to rigorously test it across multiple levels of biology.