This discovery also explains why the brain can withstand damage and indicates that the positions of synapses in all brains of the same species are more similar than different. “Positioning synapses in this way is very robust,” says computational neuroscientist and first author Sean Hill, “We could vary density, position, orientation, and none of that changed the distribution of positions of the synapses.” They went on to discover that the synapses positions are only robust as long as the morphology of each neuron is slightly different from each other, explaining another mystery in the brain – why neurons are not all identical in shape. “It’s the diversity in the morphology of neurons that makes brain circuits of a particular species basically the same and highly robust,” says Hill.
gwern comments on Bad news for uploading