Ralph Greenspan from the University of California in San Diego: "The project will help answer most of the questions regarding the way the brain works. From simple things like how to move your finger to complicated things like understanding economics."
The Obama administration plans to launch a multi-year research effort that will create the activity map that will show how the human brain works in minute detail. This is what the New York Times reported yesterday. This is a brave step on the part of President Obama in a situation of budgetary impasse, and in an atmosphere that makes it difficult to start large projects.
The final goal, which will probably take decades to implement, is to answer basic questions such as how the brain produces thoughts, dreams, memories, perception and connections between events, and to find ways to intervene and influence these activities in the brain, and it may also be possible to determine how the brain changes over time in response to learning new things .
According to rumors in the media, the announcement is expected today, Monday, about the ten-year initiative. As part of the initiative, many scientists will participate who will map the human brain, and it will also be linked to the human genome project, but instead of the genes, the different types of cells and tissues in the brain will be studied there.
The proposal is supposed to be included in the budget proposed by Obama. It is unclear what other activities it will come at the expense of, although the National Institutes of Health may be one such source.
One of the leaders of the project will also be Ralph Greenspan, assistant director of the Cavali Institute at the University of San Diego. in an interview to the local San Diego site KPBS Greenspan says that the idea began during a conference of neuroscientists and scientists dealing with nanotechnology at the Cavali Institute about a year and a half ago.
After days of mutual discussions, at the end of the second day, a scientist who participated in the human genome project stood up and said: "I heard all of you but no one said what should be done and how to do it." said. "One of the neuroscientists answered him, "I would like to record all the nerve cells in the brain at the same time, and I have formed a group of six people to do this."
The six, including Greenspan, wrote an article in June 2012 in which they proposed approaches to brain mapping. According to Greenspan, the project will help answer most of the questions regarding the way the brain works. "From simple things like how to move your finger to complicated things like understanding economics."
The project will also help to understand what goes wrong in the minds of people suffering from psychiatric disorders and degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's.
Greenspan added that he hopes the technology that will be developed during the project will also help speed up the economy. "Because the technologies that will be required to see everything that happens in the brain will require new type of detectors, almost like those described in science fiction books, there will certainly be technological derivatives that can help in completely different areas" he said. "This will have a positive economic impact in areas that have nothing to do with the brain or with living things."
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To my father Blizovsky,
In the last paragraph it is written "almost like these" the "about" should be removed from these. In addition, in the last sentence, the word "areas" should be changed to "fields", in this case FIELDS does not talk about areas...
It seems to me that we can learn a lot from such an initiative, but I doubt if they will be able to understand the brain behind it, even at the end of the project... but at least we will know what it is not...
It is similar to the EU flagship project.
The other was graphene.
Assaf, the project is called "The Human Brain Project" and not as you wrote (the project you mentioned is indeed used as a starting point, but this is not the name of the project)
The second thing could be that competition here is actually good.
There is already a similar project called the Blue Brain and the Union is going to invest a lot of money in it, why not join forces?