Exploring the Unknown Frontier of the Brain by James L. Olds.
From the post:
To a large degree, your brain is what makes you… you. It controls your thinking, problem solving and voluntary behaviors. At the same time, your brain helps regulate critical aspects of your physiology, such as your heart rate and breathing.
And yet your brain — a nonstop multitasking marvel — runs on only about 20 watts of energy, the same wattage as an energy-saving light bulb.
Still, for the most part, the brain remains an unknown frontier. Neuroscientists don’t yet fully understand how information is processed by the brain of a worm that has several hundred neurons, let alone by the brain of a human that has 80 billion to 100 billion neurons. The chain of events in the brain that generates a thought, behavior or physiological response remains mysterious.
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Building on these and other recent innovations, President Barack Obama launched the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies Initiative (BRAIN Initiative) in April 2013. Federally funded in 2015 at $200 million, the initiative is a public-private research effort to revolutionize researchers’ understanding of the brain.
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James reviews currently funded efforts under the BRAIN Initiative, each of which is pursuing possible ways to explore, model and understand brain activity. Exploration in its purest sense. The researchers don’t know what they will find.
I suspect the leap from not understanding <302 neurons in a worm to understanding the 80 to 100 billion neurons in each person, is going to happen anytime soon. Just as well, think of all the papers, conferences and publications along the way!