PLOS, LIZA GROSSAs the dust settles around the launch of President Obama’s BRAIN Initiative, researchers are assessing the state of brain-mapping science. BRAIN aims to map the circuits of the human brain, linking electrical and chemical activity to behavior and cognition. Some believe mapping the brain and its activities would demystify the human mind and promote the development of new treatments. Others maintain that it is impractical to map the entire brain, with its seemingly infinite connections.
“It is seductive to compare this project to the Human Genome Project,” said Emery Brown, a neuroscientist and anesthesiologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and an advisor to the BRAIN Initiative. However, he added, “human brain mapping is far more complex.”
Comparatively speaking, neuroscientists are perhaps as close to mapping the entire brain today as Watson, Crick, and Franklin were to sequencing the entire human genome in the 1950s. Today’s neuroscientists are beginning to develop the technologies that will be required to achieve a much greater goal, which is likely to be fully realized only by future generations.
The brain can be observed at several different levels—from molecules to cells, to circuits and systems, and to the entire organ and its vast networks. Even ...
