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Brain and Body Conflict Helps Thinking Outside the Box.

It's hard to argue against gathering new knowledge."įollow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter and Google+. "To understand the brain, we need the anatomical pathways, but crucially, we need to know the function of the circuits. "I think a lot of these people view the BAM as a zero-sum game, and they want to protect their own field, without realizing this is a positive-sum game," he said of critics. He envisions "brain observatories" where scientists in any brain field could come and use the neural circuit-monitoring tools on projects of their own. Yuste argues that BAM will benefit neuroscientists across the board. "Do you put everything into this kind of 'moonshot' approach at the expense of everything else?" he said. He and other neuroscientists also worry that the brain project will pull resources from other worthy neuroscience causes. The brain is so plastic, re-writing circuits in response to environmental changes, Stein told LiveScience, that any map would be unreliable and ungeneralizable to larger contexts. "I don't think that their particular approach of trying to map the brain through imaging is really necessarily the way that's the best reflection of what is actually going on in the brain," said Don Stein, director of the Brain Research Laboratory at the Emory University School of Medicine, who has been critical of the project.

The mapping project has come under criticism for its focus on functional circuitry as opposed to anatomy, and for having a more nebulous end goal than the Human Genome Project's simple "Map the human genome." Not all the troops in neuroscience are energized, however. "I think the best medicine at a time like this is to propose ideas like BAM, to energize the troops, so to speak," he said. Larger-scale benefits in the form of technological impacts on medicine, agriculture and other fields are only just beginning, the report concluded.Ĭurrent federal funding cuts to science are worrying, Yuste said, but he sees the Brain Activity Map as a much-needed shot in the arm to raise public and congressional support for science. That economic number comes from a report commissioned by the Life Technologies Foundation and conducted by the Battelle Technology Partnership Practice, which found the benefits in genomics-related employment and subsequent tax revenue. "Every dollar invested in the human genome technology brought back $140 to the economy," he said. That investment was worth it, Yuste said. However, the project's advocates compare the Brain Activity Map to the Human Genome Project, which cost $3.8 billion over 13 years. Yuste declined to give an expected price tag for the project, saying that funding decisions are up to funding agencies (the scientists expect a mix of public and private funding). "It's very likely that there are both mental diseases and also neurological diseases that will be greatly advanced by these technologies." "All these brain diseases are also missing that piece," Yuste told LiveScience, referring to an understanding of neurocircuitry. Additionally, it could lead to new treatments for stroke, spinal cord injury and other neurological diseases, they wrote. If successful, the project could also help explain the origins of autism, schizophrenia, dementia and depression. The scientists argue that the project would help develop technology such as nanoscale neural probes that could be used in the clinical treatment of brain problems.

(Image credit: Courtesy FONAR Corporation) This would also allow scientists to study significant chunks of the mouse cortex in one fell swoop.Īn MRI scan reveals the gross anatomical structure of the human brain. Within five years, the researchers write, scientists should be able to monitor tens of thousands of neurons at once - within 10 years, hundreds of thousands.īy year 15 of the project, the researchers plan to be able to monitor million-neuron networks, the size of an entire zebrafish's brain. The plan, as laid out in the journal Science, is to begin with small-brained invertebrates and move up in brain complexity. Scientists also need tools to alter the action of individual neurons in a circuit in order to test the effects of a single cell on the whole system. To find out, Yuste and his colleagues say, researchers must be able to monitor whole, interacting networks of neurons at once. How do neurons work together in networks? What happens when the brain's circuitry breaks down? They can watch the whole brain in action using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and other techniques. Currently, scientists can monitor the activity of a single neuron using electrodes.