The effort could lead to not much at all, as some in the scientific community are saying. Scientists hope a completed map of the brain could lead to better outcomes for mental illnesses such as Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia, or dementia.īut that's only the hope. But that's on the extreme ends of the possibilities.
In mapping the human brain, scientists could find a way to recreate it, allowing computers to have human-like intelligence. The outcomes of the project are both vague and potentially earth-shattering. Scientists would start out small, mapping the brains of tiny animals, such as fruit flies, and then work their way, slowly, to the human organ. Whole new research techniques will have to be invented.
Human brain mapping obama full#
"To date, it has not been possible to reconstruct the full activity patterns of even a single region of the brain," researchers spearheading the endeavor write in the journal Neuron. The president has proposed $100 million for the project in his 2014 budget, which has to be approved by Congress, and the undertaking may last decades. The BRAIN Initiative, as it is called, would aim to map out each and every one of them. There are an estimated 100 billion neurons in those three pounds, amounting to 150 trillion connections. "As humans, we can identify galaxies light years away, we can study particles smaller than an atom," the president said at the White House, "but we still haven't unlocked the mystery of the three pounds of matter that sits between our ears." President Obama on Tuesday announced a "moonshot" proposal of his own: Map the human brain. The human genome project in the 1990s opened the door for a whole new field of genetics-based medicine. Spinoff discoveries from the Apollo missions can still be found in everyday life: from firefighter suits to air-cushioned sneakers, CAT scans, and cordless power drills. Scientists are now eager to embark on an ambitious, and potentially fruitless, decades-long endeavor to find out, exactly, how the most essential human organ functions.Īmbitious science projects can often spark new industries and innovations. And yet we know relatively little about the organ that makes these discoveries possible: the human brain. We have mapped out the human genome, sent probes into the vast reaches of the solar system, and split the atom.
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