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With this effort, the Blue Brain project and the Brain Atlas, science is doing some amazing stuff...



Mapping the Most Complex Structure in the Universe: Your Brain

January 24, 2008 - Wired - Harvard scientists have embarked upon an ambitious program to create a circuit diagram of the human brain, with the help of new machines that automatically turn brain tissue into high-resolution neural maps.

By mapping every synapse in the brain, researchers hope to create a "connectome" -- a diagram that would elucidate the brain's activity at a level of detail far outstripping today's most advanced brain-monitoring tools like fMRI.

For the rest of the article:
http://www.wired.com/science/discoverie ... nnectomics

This seems like a terrific tool, except for the part about taking slices of the brain to look at and then putting it back together.

I wonder how they get from slicing the mouse brain to slicing a human brain.

There is no guess as to how long this will take, but it should give vasts amount of information that will be helpful.


gwa

GWA, you'd better ask my David: he used to slice brains nearly every day when doing neuropathology!

Sarah

Did David slice the brains while patients were still alive? If so, I didn't realize it could be done premortem.

gwa

Crumbs, no, it was all postmortem!

Sarah

Well, then when time comes for Harvard to get volunteers, I will pass.

gwa

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At this point, this is all nothing more than a distant dream for which the majority of the necessary technology doesn't yet exist.

I'll have to disagree with you there Bob. It's not a "dream", it's a project being worked on at Harvard by leading scientists. Last I checked, scientific funding isn't so easy to come by that money is thrown at dreams. They have developed the hardware - ok, maybe they're still refining it - but it's not as if they don't know how to go about it.

What I like is that they have a way of doing it, and it seems that the main thing that prevents it happening faster is the computer technology. But that technology is advancing at an exponential rate, so adequate computing power for the task at hand shouldn't take too long to develop. Still, if they're hoping to get the mouse done in 4 years, that probably means we've got quite a few more years before they finish the human connectome.

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I have no clue how long this stuff might take, other than the 4 years they say it will take to model a mouse brain. I could imagine the human brain going one of two ways. Either it's just so much larger that it takes significantly longer than a mouse, so that might get to your 15 year estimate. Or, the technology improves so much during the course of doing the 4 year mouse study that by the time they get to the human brain, they are able to do it much faster and we'll have the human model in 8-10 years. That second possibility is kind of what happened with the human genome project. Either way, it's not happening in the next couple of years. I just like to think of it from the perspective that a lot of scientists sound like they are still sceptical that this is even possible, so getting it done in 8-15 years would still be far earlier than a lot of people might have predicted.