the brain is a noisy Place neurons chatter constantly sending messages that underlie our thoughts feelings emotions and just about everything we do now a new view of the synapse the place where two nerve cells or neurons meet offers a detailed look at how neurons send messages using a variety of techniques scientists reconstructed a rat synaptic Bouton the message sending tip of a neuron the scientists made each protein in their reconstruction a different color so they could see where the proteins are in the Bouton and how they interact despite what it looks like these proteins only fill about seven percent of the space inside a Bhutan still it can get quite crowded which makes it hard for the small spheres called vesicles to move around vesicles are the fairies that shuttle proteins and chemical messages to the edge of the Bouton and release them into the synapse a single vesicle is about 42 nanometers in diameter the tiny sphere is loaded with proteins on its outer shell and the chemical messages are packed inside the mission of the vesicle is to move these messages to the bhutan's active Zone the active Zone shown in glowing red houses specialized proteins to help vesicles release their payloads which are responsible for cell to cell communication once the vesicles make it to the active zone They meld with the cell membrane and release their messages into the synapse of course this is only the tip of a neuron the team is planning to recreate an entire neuron to understand in extreme detail potentially billions of transactions neurons make every second and how those Communications make the brain work