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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

#61

Post by Retric »

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…

Let's add to that fMRI data is next to useless for actually studying the brain. It can map large scale organisation, but it's like trying to measure the economy based on which power stations are in use at any given time.

Re: Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain

#62

Post by muhfuhkuh »

adventured wrote: post #46
jivatmanx wrote: post #38

I'm skeptical, but if it's reasonable to spend over a Trillion on a manned fighter project (F-35) considering the pathetic state of that project, then the few billion for this is worthwhile a million times over

How about neither. The Paul Allen brain Atlas, among many other private initiatives, is capable of pursuing this goal better than the federal government, in the same way and for the exact same reasons that Craig Venter & Co. embarrassed the human genome project.

Actually, UC Santa Cruz and the NHGRI/NIH embarrassed Celera by publishing the human genome and setting the whole thing public domain several days before Celera could publish then patent their mappings. And, anyway, the only reason Venter went private was to draw a line in the sand about shotgun sequencing, for which he was having trouble finding public funding/support.

Besides, no one got into space faster than governments, no one has managed to develop cures and vaccines for large-scale and deadly diseases than labs directly funded by the NIH and other governmental agencies, and no one has had the infrastructure to build large-scale networks like the Internet like governments.

I won't even mention interstate/intercontinental highways, sewer systems, healthcare outside of the US, etc. There are simply some things that cannot be done by anyone but the uppercase-P People.

Re: Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain

#63

Post by fluidcruft »

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…

Matlab can mmap. SPM may not use it because they have limited themselves to Matlab 7 (2004) compatibility (also no toolboxes).

http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/memory-mapping.html

It's somewhat a moot point though, because everyone likes to gzip their nifti and unfortunately the file formats don't have a uniformly-accepted way to leverage the huge disk savings we can get from masked data without applying (stupid from the point of view of the types of analysis we do) compression. Even filesystem-level compression doesn't help. If you can fit all your data into available RAM, you're fine. If not...

Re: Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain

#64

Post by ank286 »

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…

ADNI initiative shares data and most researchers are part of it. NIH is HUGE on sharing.

Re: Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain

#65

Post by thwest »

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…

Why do you imply that the Human Genome Project was a scam?

Re: Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain

#66

Post by lars »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #49
lars wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Genome is a couple megabytes. Brain is terabytes. A billion times more complex. And its not all about the chemistry, its about the physical wiring. So the same techniques won't apply.

Yes, but you only have to double a megabyte 30 times to get a terabyte. That's a better perspective to take when dealing with exponential growth. Of course, the genome and the brain are different things, but the point remains that if you believe this will have an exponential growth, being far away from solving it is exactly where you expect us to be right now. And even now, we do have quite good computational models for certain small parts of the brain.

Re: Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain

#67

Post by fluidcruft »

Retric wrote: post #61
simonster wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Let's add to that fMRI data is next to useless for actually studying the brain. It can map large scale organisation, but it's like trying to measure the economy based on which power stations are in use at any given time.

You could learn quite a bit about the organization and function of a country based on the temporal-spatial patterns of its energy consumption particularly when you're given the power to control external stimuli. But yeah, it could be pretty useless for studying something on the scale of a subdivision. It depends entirely on which spatial scales you are interested in studying.

Re: Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain

#68

Post by return0 »

ank286 wrote: post #64
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…

ADNI initiative shares data and most researchers are part of it. NIH is HUGE on sharing.

Interesting, i 've never been able to find e.g. spike recordings from a published study. ADNI seems to be only about alzheimers

Re: Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain

#69

Post by mortehu »

lars wrote: post #66
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genome is a couple megabytes. Brain is terabytes. A billion times more complex. And its not all about the chemistry, its about the physical wiring. So the same techniques won't apply.

Yes, but you only have to double a megabyte 30 times to get a terabyte. That's a better perspective to take when dealing with exponential growth. Of course, the genome and the brain are different things, but the point remains that if you believe this will have an exponential growth, being far away from solving it is exactly where you expect us to be right now. And even now, we do have quite good computational models…

> you only have to double a megabyte 30 times to get a terabyte.

It seems to be only 19.93 times according to Wolfram Alpha?

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=log%281+terabyte%2F1+me...

Re: Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain

#70

Post by simonster »

fluidcruft wrote: post #63
simonster wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Matlab can mmap. SPM may not use it because they have limited themselves to Matlab 7 (2004) compatibility (also no toolboxes). http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/memory-mapping.html It's somewhat a moot point though, because everyone likes to gzip their nifti and unfortunately the file formats don't have a uniformly-accepted way to leverage the huge disk savings we can get from masked data without applying (stupid…

I wasn't aware of this, and it's surprisingly hard to Google. Thanks for informing me.
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