By combining careful electrophysiological recordings with detailed morphological analysis of layer 5 pyramidal cells, A. Galloni et al. found that the same neuron types from adjacent cortical areas can have very different functional properties. This may have important clinical implications for the understanding of how changes in neuron shape and variations in cortical thickness affects the pathophysiology in brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, autism or bipolar disorder. Our neuron shape analysis platform LMtrace was instrumental for the full reconstruction of the neurons in this study.