Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 79 posts

Re: Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain

#3

Post by ihnorton »

chbrown wrote: post #2

This sounds awfully familiar (Europe's a step ahead, this time, at least in the press): http://uk.news.yahoo.com/billion-euro-supercomputer-to--simu...

Not exactly.

  The Obama initiative is markedly different from a recently 
  announced European project that will invest 1 billion euros 
  in a Swiss-led effort to build a silicon-based “brain.” The 
  project seeks to construct a supercomputer simulation using 
  the best research about the inner workings of the brain.

  Critics, however, say the simulation will be built on 
  knowledge that is still theoretical, incomplete or 
  inaccurate.

Re: Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain

#4

Post by mtgx »

This sounds like a reactionary move after Europe announced their own. Can't complain though. Great to see they are taking this sort of research seriously. Now if they started funding international anti-asteroid systems, too (like how Russia suggested), that would be great.

Re: Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain

#6

Post by ibuildthings »

http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/cms/lang/en/pid/56882 Here are more details of the European project (labelled Blue Brain Project) other posters had mentioned about in this thread. Also, there is this TED talk http://www.ted.com/talks/henry_markram_supercomputing_the_br... by Henry Markram, the project director of the blue brain project.

Re: Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain

#9

Post by gph »

I may be way out of my depth on this, but isn't this project assuming that there is a 'normative' human brain, and that we all have the same neuron structure?

I know we all have the same general brain regions, and in most of us they function approximately the same. But to go down to the neuronal-level will any single brain be able to give a map that would be useful to the population as a whole? Or are they planning on making some type of composite map from multiple sources?

Re: Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain

#10

Post by cantastoria »

I was stunned reading this. It looks like the group pushing this project are just taking advantage of the president's advisers ignorance. Cognitive neuroscientists, psychologists and neurologists have been "mapping" the human brain for well over 20 years now. There's even a conference dedicated to the pursuit (http://www.humanbrainmapping.org) it attracts over 2500 attendees each year. Unless this project is focusing on some aspect of the brain that has yet to be studied (not very likely) it looks like this is just going to take NIH funds away from researchers who are already working in these areas. It doesn't surprise me though. Francis Collins (head of NIH) was the leader of the publicly funded half of the Human Genome Project. I guess he's trying to pull the same trick twice. It will be very interesting to see what the final proposal looks like.

EDIT:

Also claims that "we'll be able to cure Alzheimers!" are pretty much part of every grant proposal submitted to NIMH in one way or the other. It's just an easy way to get your "impact on public health" covered. I can't believe they're failing for it here.

Post reply on HN