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Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain

nytimes.com

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Re: Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain

#21

Post by Rocky_Outcrop »

ihnorton wrote: post #18
cantastoria wrote: post #10

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 focusi…

Right, and people had been playing with rockets for 30 years before the Apollo project. There is something to be said for large, concerted effort toward a singular goal. There are still enough massive gaps in our understanding of the brain to justify further research. That said, this press speculation is just fluff and it's unclear to me whether it is possible to define such a focused goal. As an aside, I don't quite…

It's a positive goal not related to the military. I applaud that.

Re: Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain

#22

Post by omnisci »

keypusher wrote: post #15

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.…

Well said! I agree and you are correct that the software used for this stuff pretty much sucks. The thing is that a lot of scientists don't know that the software could be better, and they are reluctant to try new software considering it is so expensive (We just spent $5k on a licence for software that is subpar. I've seen this 91203091283 times and it's disappointing). New software will change the game.

To add to that list, http://www.brain-map.org/ is a reallllllllly nice tool. I love what this company is doing in terms of automating gene expression within the brain and look forward to their software going through some revisions.

Re: Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain

#23

Post by abecedarius »

On the claimed $800 billion dollar return on the human genome project: http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110511/full/news.2011.281.ht... (It's skeptical but vague; it looked like the rest of the top hits just parroted the press release.)

Anyone have access to the brain-mapping proposal? http://www.cell.com/neuron/abstract/S0896-6273%2812%2900518-... "The function of neural circuits is an emergent property that arises from the coordinated activity of large numbers of neurons. To capture this, we propose launching a large-scale, international public effort, the Brain Activity Map Project, aimed at reconstructing the full record of neural activity across complete neural circuits. This technological challenge could prove to be an invaluable step toward understanding fundamental and pathological brain processes."

Re: Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain

#24

Post by cantastoria »

ihnorton wrote: post #18
cantastoria wrote: post #10

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 focusi…

Right, and people had been playing with rockets for 30 years before the Apollo project. There is something to be said for large, concerted effort toward a singular goal. There are still enough massive gaps in our understanding of the brain to justify further research. That said, this press speculation is just fluff and it's unclear to me whether it is possible to define such a focused goal. As an aside, I don't quite…

It's more like if people had been already going to the moon for 30 years in this case.

There is something to be said for large, concerted effort toward a singular goal.

As I said that concerted effort has been going on for quite some time now it just hasn't been funded by a narrow project that will benefit very few scientists (and apparently Google, Microsoft and Qualcomm).

It's not cynicism, it's healthy skepticism. "More money on science" in this case looks more like a boondoggle that will benefit a few select scientists and corporations and will probably end up taking money away from a larger group of scientists already looking into these areas.

Re: Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain

#25

Post by lars »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #12

Sounds like snake oil. Too early to build a complete human brain model. Simpler brain models (cat, lizard) haven't been done yet (?) but that's not headline-worthy. How about "President announces program to solve all human suffering"? About as meaningless, but would actually be more useful if by some astronomical fluke they succeeded.

It's on the same timescale as the European Blue Brain Project (and also Kurzweil's predictions, if you put any faith in that). If you believe that this an information technology that has an exponential growth, it's not a sufficient objection that we're far off now. The same objections were raised for the Human Genome Project, which was far from completion most of its duration, but followed an exponential growth and completed on time.

Re: Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain

#26

Post by cantastoria »

keypusher wrote: post #15

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.…

Agreed about the horrible tools. Unfortunately, this is an extremely difficult market to break into. Most academics want free and open source tools and don't care how many research assistants or post-docs they have to torture to use them. Compounding the problem is that the market is so small any commercial product is going to have to be very expensive (>$1000.00) to make it worth while re: development and support costs. For instance something like BrainVoyager (http://www.brainvoyager.com/) which is a commercial competitor the tools you listed starts at $4,000 which is a pretty good chunk of any equipment budget on a grant.

Re: Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain

#27

Post by jpwagner »

ihnorton wrote: post #18
cantastoria wrote: post #10

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 focusi…

Right, and people had been playing with rockets for 30 years before the Apollo project. There is something to be said for large, concerted effort toward a singular goal. There are still enough massive gaps in our understanding of the brain to justify further research. That said, this press speculation is just fluff and it's unclear to me whether it is possible to define such a focused goal. As an aside, I don't quite…

  President: we will spend more money on science! HN: Meh?
The cynicism is that all "science" is not equal. Correct or not, cantastoria's criticism is that giving money to charlatans takes that money away from basic research. A good counterargument would outline why "mapping the brain" is possible and a good use of resources. Personally, I'm still waiting for that from someone.

Re: Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain

#28

Post by ihnorton »

jpwagner wrote: post #27
ihnorton wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, and people had been playing with rockets for 30 years before the Apollo project. There is something to be said for large, concerted effort toward a singular goal. There are still enough massive gaps in our understanding of the brain to justify further research. That said, this press speculation is just fluff and it's unclear to me whether it is possible to define such a focused goal. As an aside, I don't quite…

President: we will spend more money on science! HN: Meh? The cynicism is that all "science" is not equal. Correct or not, cantastoria's criticism is that giving money to charlatans takes that money away from basic research. A good counterargument would outline why "mapping the brain" is possible and a good use of resources. Personally, I'm still waiting for that from someone.

  Correct or not, cantastoria's criticism is that giving money to 
  charlatans takes that money away from basic research.
I don't understand who the supposed charlatans are. The basic scientists lauded by cantastoria for doing existing research are almost certainly going to get the lion's share of this new money.

  outline why "mapping the brain" is possible and a good use of 
  resources.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627312...

Re: Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain

#29

Post by cbennett »

ibuildthings wrote: post #6

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.

found these three documentaries on the progress of the project so far. worth a watch! http://bluebrainfilm.com/bb/

Re: Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain

#30

Post by jpwagner »

ihnorton wrote: post #28
jpwagner wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

President: we will spend more money on science! HN: Meh? The cynicism is that all "science" is not equal. Correct or not, cantastoria's criticism is that giving money to charlatans takes that money away from basic research. A good counterargument would outline why "mapping the brain" is possible and a good use of resources. Personally, I'm still waiting for that from someone.

Correct or not, cantastoria's criticism is that giving money to charlatans takes that money away from basic research. I don't understand who the supposed charlatans are. The basic scientists lauded by cantastoria for doing existing research are almost certainly going to get the lion's share of this new money. outline why "mapping the brain" is possible and a good use of resources. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science…

  ...are almost certainly going to get the lion's share of this new money.
Not sure why you think that.

Here's the pdf for your link (I can only guess that you find this paper convincing): http://bit.ly/Y2AXtz

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