DOUBLEDAY, FEBRUARY 2014I was drawn to science, even as a child, in part by a fascination with science fiction, especially the genre’s treatment of telepathy, telekinesis, cyborgs, uploading memories, etc. But in the real world, the inner workings of the brain have long been obscured, seemingly beyond the reach of science. It is to these mysteries that I turn in my latest book, The Future of the Mind.
Within the past few decades, largely because of advances in physics, an avalanche of new experimental tools has revealed some of the most intimate details of the human mind. Magnetic probes can safely deaden a specific region of the brain, making it possible to discern that region’s function. By inserting a gene into a specific population of neurons that makes them fluoresce when they fire, one is able to light up neural routes in the brains of living animals to see which pathways control specific behaviors.
These advances have spurred President Barack Obama and the European Union to collectively allocate more than a billion dollars to reveal every neural pathway of the human brain. Like the Human Genome Project, this new program could revolutionize medicine.
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