Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain

I used to work in functional brain imaging (fMRI), so perhaps I can shed some light on this. Generally what happens is you take a group of subject, and get "structural" (anatomic) scans of their brain as well as the functional scans showing brain activity for the given task. The structural scans are then run through a statistical "normalization" procedure, which basically does some fancy bending/warping of everyone's brains such that they all line up. Once this is done you apply that normalization function to the functional scans so you can compare everyone. It is also important to note that typically neuroimaging does not go down the neuronal level, the resolution is just not that high. Typically you are looking for brain regions, or sub-regions that correlate with a given activity. Something on the order of millimeters to centimeters. However there are other ways of investigating brain activity, and some of those can go down to the neuronal level.

Here is an example of common software package to do such normalization and analysis: http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm/

While there has been a huge growth in brain research over the last decade or so, the methods and analysis are still immature, and results are often quite fuzzy (even if researchers would like their reviewers to believe otherwise). There also doesn't seem to be a clear goal here, other than to throw a bunch of money at some interesting questions. The Genome Project had the very clear goal of mapping the human genome. The European project aims to simulate a human brain. This just seems to be directing a lot of money at research which is already being done.

That being said, I think there might be some very interesting opportunities here for talented developers. When I worked in the field a few years ago, the software used for this stuff was generally a lot of MATLAB scripts with C subroutines held together by some scripting language duct tape (Python/Bash). It was slow, it was buggy, we were basically writing documentation as we figured it out ourselves, different labs had different methods and scripts and in general it was kind of a mess. It's actually bad enough that there are research grants out there to develop better analysis software. Most of the researchers are trained in statistics, neuroscience, and psychology but have very little programming experience. If you are interested in some of the software that is out there right now, below is a partial list. Also, if you are interested in this kind of research but can't contribute code-wise, contact your local research university. They are always looking for test subjects for this kind of stuff, you usually get paid pretty well ($50-100/hour for imaging studies) and you get some cool images of your own brain out of it if you ask.

http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm/

http://fsl.fmrib.ox.ac.uk/fsl/fslwiki/FSL

http://afni.nimh.nih.gov/afni

http://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/

http://nipy.sourceforge.net/

http://www.trackvis.org/

How about a 10 year project to pay off the National Debt?

Quit wasting money on science projects that aren't needed (this is already being done).

For anyone still curious after watching the TED talk, also see the Almaden Cognitive Computing 2006 series - these presentations are technically intense (cellular biology, beyond-pop neuroscience) but(/and) enjoyable. The second one in the series is a lecture/presentation by the same Henry Markram: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gFI7o69VJM

NB: intros (by those other people at the start of each video) tend to be long (especially for the first presentation (which is by the way very interesting as well)), I'd maybe skip them.

There are a couple of other videos from the series on youtube, but the original collection of twelve was removed from google video once that service became defunct. They are still available via somewhat obscure means from the original source:

webpage (original now gone from the source for some reason) with links to original AVIs and PPTs: http://kostas.mkj.lt/almaden2006/agenda.shtml ; I'm redownloading those AVIs now just in case... (www.almaden.ibm.com/institute/resources/2006/Disk[1-12].avi (replace integer interval with a single integer.))