Are we living in the age of the brain?

[C C]

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....

[stryder]

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.

That's both interesting and problematic at the same time. During the second world war many unethical "eugenic" experiments were conducted and imaging/mapping genetics to "class" the misfit's as such from society it's much like it's predecessor experiments but without the demonisation of war. Are we becoming too complacent with what we allow?

To be honest the topic if the BRAIN initiative fund is a concern for me directly, as something I don't divulge too often is that I personally have for 16+ years been dealing with a group that have been misusing me through radiology. It's a story that's heard many times through the psychiatry circuit in relationship to a person that claims abuse of another yet there is purportedly no physical evidence (which technically wouldn't exist due the nature of the abuse).

Unfortunately those abusing are a mixture of Government professions (security services) and psychiatric's which are unwilling to fit the bill of paying someone for their time of effort as a labrat (and therefore victim of circumstance). The problem of course is that information obtained by this measure would not stand the scrutiny of the scientific community due to the misappropriation of the information (how it borders of those activities deemed as unacceptable by the Nuremberg Commission after the second world war)

So as with any criminal activity this would require some other way to "fence" the stolen information via a different preface, in this case the creation of a hypothetical artificial brain construct.

I pose that in it's current state all of those people that have "assisted" without their expressed agreement, will likely have whatever information that has been collected made available by a bogus proposition that some artificial construct accrued to the results. It's the spoils of a hidden war finding it's way to the market place via way of ... (not in this instance Switzerland)

In essence what I concern myself with is that BRAIN initiative might well have it's enlisted of true believers in the project that do not condone the misuse of their fellow man, could well be the equivalent of a Nazi front. (And while this would seem a conspiracy, explain to me exactly what those that do misuse our fellow humans have to gain if there is no profit?)

[Magical Realist]

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?”

"Neuroscientists have long suspected as much [that our brain operates on the edge of chaos]. Only recently, however, have they come up with proof that brains work this way. Now they are trying to work out why. Some believe that near-chaotic states may be crucial to memory, and could explain why some people are smarter than others.

In technical terms, systems on the edge of chaos are said to be in a state of "self-organised criticality". These systems are right on the boundary between stable, orderly behaviour - such as a swinging pendulum - and the unpredictable world of chaos, as exemplified by turbulence.

The quintessential example of self-organised criticality is a growing sand pile. As grains build up, the pile grows in a predictable way until, suddenly and without warning, it hits a critical point and collapses. These "sand avalanches" occur spontaneously and are almost impossible to predict, so the system is said to be both critical and self-organising. Earthquakes, avalanches and wildfires are also thought to behave like this, with periods of stability followed by catastrophic periods of instability that rearrange the system into a new, temporarily stable state.

Self-organised criticality has another defining feature: even though individual sand avalanches are impossible to predict, their overall distribution is regular. The avalanches are "scale invariant", which means that avalanches of all possible sizes occur. They also follow a "power law" distribution, which means bigger avalanches happen less often than smaller avalanches, according to a strict mathematical ratio. Earthquakes offer the best real-world example. Quakes of magnitude 5.0 on the Richter scale happen 10 times as often as quakes of magnitude 6.0, and 100 times as often as quakes of magnitude 7.0.

These are purely physical systems, but the brain has much in common with them. Networks of brain cells alternate between periods of calm and periods of instability - "avalanches" of electrical activity that cascade through the neurons. Like real avalanches, exactly how these cascades occur and the resulting state of the brain are unpredictable."===http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/1...00166/full

[Image: Brain-Hemispheres-Flickr-Photo-Sharing1.jpg]