Today, President Obama announced plans for a long-term project to map the human brain at all levels, from individual neurons to complex neural circuits, called the BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies). The President is proposing to devote $100 million to start the Initiative as part of his FY2014 Budget.
An excerpt from the NIH announcement on the BRAIN Initiative:
By accelerating the development and application of innovative technologies, researchers will be able to produce a revolutionary new dynamic picture of the brain that, for the first time, shows how individual cells and complex neural circuits interact in both time and space.
HCP Co-PI David Van Essen was asked about his thoughts on the BRAIN Initiative by NPR’s Jonathan Hamilton in his story “Obama’s Plan To Explore The Brain A ‘Most Audacious Project'” that aired today on the program All Things Considered.
Van Essen is optimistic about the Initiative, but cautious about the BRAIN Initiative’s incredibly ambitious goal to understand the dynamics and function of all 100 billion neurons in the human brain. He says, that monitoring the activity of the entire brain at the neuronal level is much more likely to succeed in organisms with smaller brains “like mice and fruit flies, and other animals”, he adds, “but I honestly don’t think it will be realistic to have that kind of sensitivity for mapping the human brain”.
Van Essen also commented that mapping the human brain as outlined in the BRAIN Initiative will be much more difficult than the goal of sequencing the human genome was for the Human Genome Project, which was successfully completed in 2003. One big distinction is due to the inherently large differences between individual people’s brains, which will make learning about how the brain works much more complex, Van Essen says:
Whether you are talking about one individual human brain to another human brain, or one mouse brain to a monkey brain to a human brain, the differences are vastly greater than the differences in the genome.
Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health, who was present for the President’s announcement, and also was interviewed for the NPR story, acknowledges that the BRAIN Initiative is ambitious: “to understand how the human brain works is about the most audacious scientific project you could imagine, it’s the most complicated structure in the known universe.”
Despite its lofty ambitions, Dr. Collins is fully behind the Initiative’s promise for scientific advancement, adding, “Five years ago, this might have seemed out of reach. Five years from now, it will seem like we waited too late to take advantage of the opportunity.”
The member universities of the Human Connectome Project take privacy very seriously, whether dealing with participant data or the data of those visiting this website.
The participant data from our research into the Human Connectome that is stored in our XNAT server is de-identified, and contains no personal health information (PHI).
Our website collects names and email addresses via our contact form. This information is used solely by the administrators and members of the HCP website and is not shared, traded or sold to third parties under any circumstances.
Our website may also collect non-personal data about site visits, sessions, and IP addresses. This information is only used for diagnostic or debugging purposes, to help us optimize our website's performance, and is not shared externally. This is a standard practice for most websites, and this data is never linked with personally identifiable information.
This website contains links to other websites whose content we think is relevant. However, the HCP website is not responsible for maintaining or updating the content of these other sites. If any of these sites are found to contain irrelevant or offensive information, please contact us.
By using humanconnectome.org, you signify your agreement to our privacy policy as stated above. Note that this policy may be revised periodically without notice. Please re-read this policy prior to submitting any personal information if you have concerns about how your information is being collected and used.