http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/blogs/...-the-brain
EXCERPT: We’re surely now in the Age of the Brain. In the United States, the BRAIN Initiative, announced in 2013 and with a projected cost of $3bn, aims to map the activity of every neuron in the brain—first, those of mice and other animals, then of humans. The European Union has assigned €1bn to the ten-year Human Brain Project, which intends to deduce the brain’s wiring circuit in order to build a complete computer simulation of it. And now Japan has launched its own ten-year initiative, called Brain/MINDS, with a focus on understanding brain diseases and malfunctions such as Parkinson’s, schizophrenia and autism.
Of all these projects, the Japanese effort is the most modest, and likely to be the most useful. It will use a combination of brain imaging and genetics to try to figure out what goes wrong and why, in particular using marmosets as a model for humans. The European project, meanwhile, has already run into serious problems.
[...] One of the most striking features of the neuroscience literature is the contrast between the image of “thinking” presented there and our everyday experience. The emphasis in neuroscience is on how the brain does things: how we process visual information, how we record memories, how we move our limbs and comprehend language. It’s true of course that most of us are capable of all these impressive feats—but rarely with anything approaching computer-like efficiency. We make bad judgements, we misunderstand, and most of all, we live in mental turmoil. The mind feels like a battleground of clamouring voices, not a sleek and efficient circuit: “I’m bored with this task, but I have to finish it. Or perhaps tomorrow? Shall I just make a cup of tea?”
[...] Another danger that the big brain projects will have to navigate is the temptation to consider the brain in isolation. This has been a prevalent tendency ever since the brain became established as the “seat of the mind:” as the popular view has it, all that we are and all that we experience takes place within this wobbly mass of grey tissue. But of course, it doesn’t. To put it bluntly, no one has ever existed without a body around their brain. In a real (and an evolutionary) sense, the brain is an outgrowth of the central nervous system, which extends throughout the body. Without sensory input, the brain has nothing to do: it is just jelly. (That is of course different from saying that a brain deprived of sensory input goes blank.) The Human Brain Project acknowledges this, which is why it includes a “neurorobotics platform” that aims to create a simulated body for its simulated brain.
[...] But the challenges for the American and European brain projects in particular run deeper than all this. They are data-gathering exercises akin to the Human Genome Project. We can now see what that latter project got us: a load of data. That’s no criticism; data is good. It is already extremely useful to our understanding of genomics advances. But now that we have the “genome book,” all three billion letters of it bound and housed in the Wellcome Trust, we are like English speakers who have learnt to recite Russian poems fluently without knowing what they mean.
[...] Without doubt, formulating a “theory of the brain” is an immense challenge, probably one of the major challenges for science right now. You might imagine that it would be one of the key concerns of neuroscientists—after all, isn’t science supposed to be all about devising theories and then testing them with data? But the weird thing—I find it positively bizarre—is how much theory and hypothesis has been resisted in this field. Until recently it was given short shrift, and the one promising concept that was developed—so-called neural networks, which “learn” by reinforcing connections among its web of neurons—has turned out to be more valuable for artificial intelligence and “machine learning” than as a way to understand the human brain....
EXCERPT: We’re surely now in the Age of the Brain. In the United States, the BRAIN Initiative, announced in 2013 and with a projected cost of $3bn, aims to map the activity of every neuron in the brain—first, those of mice and other animals, then of humans. The European Union has assigned €1bn to the ten-year Human Brain Project, which intends to deduce the brain’s wiring circuit in order to build a complete computer simulation of it. And now Japan has launched its own ten-year initiative, called Brain/MINDS, with a focus on understanding brain diseases and malfunctions such as Parkinson’s, schizophrenia and autism.
Of all these projects, the Japanese effort is the most modest, and likely to be the most useful. It will use a combination of brain imaging and genetics to try to figure out what goes wrong and why, in particular using marmosets as a model for humans. The European project, meanwhile, has already run into serious problems.
[...] One of the most striking features of the neuroscience literature is the contrast between the image of “thinking” presented there and our everyday experience. The emphasis in neuroscience is on how the brain does things: how we process visual information, how we record memories, how we move our limbs and comprehend language. It’s true of course that most of us are capable of all these impressive feats—but rarely with anything approaching computer-like efficiency. We make bad judgements, we misunderstand, and most of all, we live in mental turmoil. The mind feels like a battleground of clamouring voices, not a sleek and efficient circuit: “I’m bored with this task, but I have to finish it. Or perhaps tomorrow? Shall I just make a cup of tea?”
[...] Another danger that the big brain projects will have to navigate is the temptation to consider the brain in isolation. This has been a prevalent tendency ever since the brain became established as the “seat of the mind:” as the popular view has it, all that we are and all that we experience takes place within this wobbly mass of grey tissue. But of course, it doesn’t. To put it bluntly, no one has ever existed without a body around their brain. In a real (and an evolutionary) sense, the brain is an outgrowth of the central nervous system, which extends throughout the body. Without sensory input, the brain has nothing to do: it is just jelly. (That is of course different from saying that a brain deprived of sensory input goes blank.) The Human Brain Project acknowledges this, which is why it includes a “neurorobotics platform” that aims to create a simulated body for its simulated brain.
[...] But the challenges for the American and European brain projects in particular run deeper than all this. They are data-gathering exercises akin to the Human Genome Project. We can now see what that latter project got us: a load of data. That’s no criticism; data is good. It is already extremely useful to our understanding of genomics advances. But now that we have the “genome book,” all three billion letters of it bound and housed in the Wellcome Trust, we are like English speakers who have learnt to recite Russian poems fluently without knowing what they mean.
[...] Without doubt, formulating a “theory of the brain” is an immense challenge, probably one of the major challenges for science right now. You might imagine that it would be one of the key concerns of neuroscientists—after all, isn’t science supposed to be all about devising theories and then testing them with data? But the weird thing—I find it positively bizarre—is how much theory and hypothesis has been resisted in this field. Until recently it was given short shrift, and the one promising concept that was developed—so-called neural networks, which “learn” by reinforcing connections among its web of neurons—has turned out to be more valuable for artificial intelligence and “machine learning” than as a way to understand the human brain....