Obama’s Brain Project

President Barack Obama has recently proposed the investment of $3 billion over the next 10 years into a project dedicated to deepening the study of the brain. In the last 50 years we have acquired extensive knowledge of the brain; however, the understanding of its functioning is still very limited. Most of what we know about the brain results from observing effects caused by trauma or injury. The development of imaging techniques has given us access to pictures of the brain, but studying it in action can only be accomplished in a very rudimentary way. In other words, we are able to see the brain from outside and study how small groups of neurons or individual neurons respond to stimuli; however, it takes a lot more than that to understand the activity of millions of neurons being activated simultaneously. The technology for this type of study does not exist today, but it is thought to be possible through huge economic and political government support.

Advances in nanotechnology, microelectronics and synthetic biology will be made available to neuroscientists for research, including what was once beyond the realm of possibility, such as the implant of nanosensors and wireless fiber-optic living cells genetically engineered to penetrate brain tissues and report on which neurons are responding to various stimuli and when.

What can we obtain from this knowledge? This ambitious project aims to understand how the brain produces thoughts, dreams, memories, desires, agonies and ecstasies, perceptions and consciousness.

It is outstanding to study how the brain changes its response to learning, experiences, trauma or simply the passage of time. Currently we are able to diagnose and identify injuries, but we are unable to fix them. We are able to diagnose Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, or autism and schizophrenia, but we cannot cure them. Understanding brain mechanisms in their entirety opens up the possibility of curing diseases that so far have been incurable.

Precedents of similar projects can be connected to the space race and, later, the Human Genome Project, which was finished a decade ago.

The Human Genome Project had access to tools that made the identification of the chromosomal gene sequence seem achievable in a much shorter period of time.

The brain project will create new tools to explore this organ and allow us to explain our consciousness and behavior – something that sounds simple but is probably the most ambitious goal that science has ever proposed.