2/22/2013

Here's how Obama's brain mapping project will actually work

The front page of Monday's New York Times revealed the Obama Administration may soon seek billions of dollars from Congress to map the human brain, in an ambitious project many have claimed will do for neuroscience what the Human Genome Project has done for genetics.

...allowing researchers to see not just the connections between the tens of billions of neurons that comprise a human brain, but the individual action of every cell in a given neural circuit. George Church, a molecular geneticist at Harvard University, told io9 that it's like the difference between knowing the spatial distribution of a city's telephone wires and knowing where, when, and how those wires are transmitting messages. (An early architect and longtime ambassador of the Human Genome Project, Church has been tapped to work on the BAM project, and is a co-author on last year's white paper.)

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[link to io9.com]