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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

#51

Post by JohnnyBrown »

omnisci wrote: post #39

It's clear that the software that we are using is not sufficient, and a lot of it seems to be a lack of quality control. I've been in science now for close to 10 years and the software that we use looks like it was built in 1995. This is a serious problem with science software. The features are there (for the most part), but it seems clear that much of the software engineers are not working with the users. There is a…

I've spent some time making web-based software while sitting across the lab from the scientists who use it. This looks like an interesting project, I'll email you for more info.

Re: Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain

#53

Post by return0 »

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…

The "mapping" of the brain, while accelerating, has been growing at a rather slow pace. In fact one of the few large 'mapping' projects is conducted by a non-academic entity, the Allen (of microsoft fame) institute (http://www.brain-map.org/). The reason for this slow progress is the small scale and scope of most investigations. Thousands of studies are being repeated (and mice sacrificed) because of the lack of both data sharing and concerted planning among neuroscientists. The academic pressure for publishing fast unfortunately limits the scope of most scientists to projects that can bring results easily.

This new project sounds like it is the neuroscientific analog of LHC or the Human Genome Project. The truth is that we wouldn't be able to replace the LHC with 1000 synchrotrons.

Re: Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain

#54

Post by return0 »

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.…

Add to those NEURON (http://www.neuron.yale.edu/neuron/) which is the most popular for compartmental neuron simulations. It's a terribly old program (1990) with horrible limitations yet people still use it.

Re: Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain

#55

Post by keypusher »

simonster wrote: post #45
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.…

I've thought a lot about why fMRI data analysis tools are so terrible, and I've come up with a few reasons: - It's impossible to implement the algorithms for fMRI data analysis efficiently in most "dynamic" programming languages due to the performance hit you take from using a dynamic language. (It might actually be possible in Julia, NumPyPy, Python with Numba, but these languages are not yet well-established.) On t…

Check out http://nipy.sourceforge.net/nipype/ It's basically a pipeline for plugging different packages' outputs and inputs into each other, wrappers are already there for SPM, FSL, and other well known programs and it's easy to write your own stuff if you know some Python. It speaks to exactly this approach, as it is algorithm/implementation agnostic, it just defines the process and tries to formalize getting data from one place to the next.

Re: Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain

#56

Post by return0 »

melipone wrote: post #52

How will this help "paving the way for Artificial intelligence"? We already have neural networks as a computational metaphor for the brain. I doubt we will find new metaphors. I doubt we will learn new computational tricks. Please enlight me on this issue.

ANNs were build with the assumption of point neurons as nodes in a network and many of their training algorithms are biophysically unrealistic. While ANNs can be good function approximators, they are a very inaccurate representation of brain neuronal neurons and networks (which have intricate dendrites and biophysics). We don't know yet how fundamental processes like memory storage work in the brain; it's one of the great mysteries of neuroscience.

Re: Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain

#57

Post by cantastoria »

fluidcruft wrote: post #35
cantastoria wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

BrainVoyager's approaches are from the ice age and not flexible enough to handle modern protocols. Only a moron could defend using it for research. It's tranlational at best (a toy you give those clinicians that can't even figure out SPM). But it does make pretty pictures.

I'm not defending BrainVoyager as a product. It was just an example of the type of business model the academic market requires.

Re: Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain

#58

Post by cantastoria »

return0 wrote: post #53
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…

The "mapping" of the brain, while accelerating, has been growing at a rather slow pace. In fact one of the few large 'mapping' projects is conducted by a non-academic entity, the Allen (of microsoft fame) institute ( http://www.brain-map.org/ ). The reason for this slow progress is the small scale and scope of most investigations. Thousands of studies are being repeated (and mice sacrificed) because of the lack of bo…

Maybe but one of the reason why there is such slow growth is that there's so much disagreement amongst researchers about how to interpret results.

I would be much happier if this project was focusing on creating the LHC equivalent in brain mapping w.r.t. instrumentation and methods. For instance, a cheaper imaging technology that offered 2-3x the resolution of current techniques. That would be a much more focused goal and would have clear benefits for all scientists working in these areas.

Re: Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain

#59

Post by [deleted] »

etrautmann wrote: post #41

I'm currently working to develop neural prosthetics (computer cursor, robotic arm, etc.) and it's clear to me that the president's proposed research will have real clinical impact over the timescale of 5-10 years. Our lab and others already have paralyzed human patients controlling computers in clinical trials via a brain-machine interface, but it is hard to overstate the potential possibilities that remain hidden du…

[deleted]

Re: Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain

#60

Post by return0 »

cantastoria wrote: post #58
return0 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "mapping" of the brain, while accelerating, has been growing at a rather slow pace. In fact one of the few large 'mapping' projects is conducted by a non-academic entity, the Allen (of microsoft fame) institute ( http://www.brain-map.org/ ). The reason for this slow progress is the small scale and scope of most investigations. Thousands of studies are being repeated (and mice sacrificed) because of the lack of bo…

Maybe but one of the reason why there is such slow growth is that there's so much disagreement amongst researchers about how to interpret results. I would be much happier if this project was focusing on creating the LHC equivalent in brain mapping w.r.t. instrumentation and methods. For instance, a cheaper imaging technology that offered 2-3x the resolution of current techniques. That would be a much more focused goa…

The LHC (and even the HGP) were largely engineering projects. Basic science is much more hard to focus, but there is an overarching goal nevertheless: "figure out how the brain works by any means". I presume imaging methods are part of this.
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