(Greg Miller) The Obama administration wants to make a huge investment in mapping the human brain, according to The New York Times. How can they get the most bang for their buck? We have details on three future technologies that are being eyed by the scientists behind the bold proposal.
The U.S. already has one big brain-mapping effort under way, the Human Connectome Project, which aims to map the connections between regions of the human brain. The new project would go beyond this static depiction and map the activity of individual neurons in real time.
“All the really interesting features of the brain — language, perception, cognition, the mind — emerge from collections of neurons interacting with each other in ways we don’t understand,” said neuroscientist John Donoghue of Brown University, one of the architects of the proposed project. It’s those interactions, the electrochemical blips coursing through networks of interconnected neurons, that the new Brain Activity Map project aims to capture.
The Connectome project focuses mostly on static images of the brain. Although it does include some measures of brain activity, the fMRI scans it will use provide a view that’s something like that of a city seen from an airplane window. What the scientists behind the proposed Brain Activity Map want instead are detailed street maps with real-time traffic info. Ideally, they want to record every blip of every neuron in a network of thousands, or even millions.
The scientists hope they’ll get as much as $3 billion over the next decade to build a new set of dream tools for studying the brain. At first these tools could only be used with lab animals, but ultimately they could help unravel how the human brain works and what goes wrong in disorders like epilepsy and Alzheimer’s disease. Here are three ideas they’ve discussed, all in various stages of development.
“Sure, they sound far-fetched,” Donoghue said. “But we’re on the cusp of being able to do them.”
Neuro-nanotech
For decades, the workhorse method for recording the activity of individual neurons has been hair-thin metal electrodes. Not only are they invasive — like sticking a toothpick into a bowl of Jello — but they only record from one neuron at a time. More recently, scientists have built grids with dozens of electrodes. Donoghue’s team, for example, has shown that signals from just 100 neurons or so are enough to allow a paralyzed person to operate a robotic arm.
But even that may start to look crude by comparison. Harvard physicist Hongkun Park is one of several scientists trying to pack hundreds of thousands of nanowire electrodes into flexible sheets that conform to the surface of the brain and can eavesdrop on neurons with minimal tissue damage. “I didn’t know we could make such things,” says Donoghue, who saw Park talk about his work at an early planning meeting for the brain-mapping project.
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