Awesome, this kind of things really amaze me. I'm just curious what are the possibilities once they have everything scanned. Yes we can probably cure some disease or fix some stuff, but that's kind of old news, I am more interested in what they can actually do. Can they upload new language into your brain? or what else?
Perhaps you just worded that sloppily, but why do you consider curing "some disease", like, say, schizophrenia or Alzheimer's, would not be "actually doing" something?
Well, thinking of the usual state-corporate world priorities, first they will say that the possible benefits of such research is "curing brain diseases".
Then they will forget about that (maybe after selling some unnecessarily expensive brain disease cure's to the rich) and proceed to use it for military and population control purposes.
Well, you could analyze how the human brain performs tasks that computers can't seem to do very nicely (either because our algorithms to do those tasks aren't very good, or because of some sort of inherent limitation). Among these tasks are image recognition, natural language processing, speech recognition, etc. Imagine the possibilities: you could get up in the morning, step inside of your autonomous vehicle, ask it to "drive me to work, but stop at a good coffee shop first", and have it drive you to your destination in the middle of a hurricane. Or alternatively, you could datamine the shit out of everything that ever existed.
The last part is probably just wishful thinking. I ended up writing a research paper on this topic last year, and those issues I listed are actually the ones I saw most frequently listed as the possible applications of advances in neural and cognitive sciences.
The simple connectome of c. elegans has been mapped, and there is an open source project to use this dataset and other data to run a full simulation of the worm in a virtual environment:
http://openworm.org
Can't imagine what those few thick rendered wires represent in a brain. Do they stand for signals by strength? Why can't we see how they terminate? Why are the bundles seemingly unconnected with one another?
I didn't get any insight from that graphic. For $40M I hope they have some better results than that.
[+] [-] uvdiv|13 years ago|reply
http://www.humanconnectomeproject.org/2012/01/first-public-r...
[+] [-] peterhajas|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gmig|13 years ago|reply
"The aim the $40m programme is to map the entire human neural wiring system by scanning the brains of 1,200 Americans."
[+] [-] protothomas|13 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.dnasequencing.org/history-of-dna
[+] [-] Tomino|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cpressey|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldtea|13 years ago|reply
Then they will forget about that (maybe after selling some unnecessarily expensive brain disease cure's to the rich) and proceed to use it for military and population control purposes.
[+] [-] shitlord|13 years ago|reply
The last part is probably just wishful thinking. I ended up writing a research paper on this topic last year, and those issues I listed are actually the ones I saw most frequently listed as the possible applications of advances in neural and cognitive sciences.
[+] [-] wcoenen|13 years ago|reply
The simple connectome of c. elegans has been mapped, and there is an open source project to use this dataset and other data to run a full simulation of the worm in a virtual environment: http://openworm.org
[+] [-] hmexx|13 years ago|reply
I wonder what fraction of the wiring in the brain these represent.
I guess these are only the largest "pathway" structures?
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|13 years ago|reply
I didn't get any insight from that graphic. For $40M I hope they have some better results than that.