
Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain - robg
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/18/science/project-seeks-to-build-map-of-human-brain.html?hp&gwh=272E78410C052816AA5CF561786F33C7
======
cantastoria
I was stunned reading this. It looks like the group pushing this project are
just taking advantage of the president's advisers ignorance. Cognitive
neuroscientists, psychologists and neurologists have been "mapping" the human
brain for well over 20 years now. There's even a conference dedicated to the
pursuit (<http://www.humanbrainmapping.org>) it attracts over 2500 attendees
each year. Unless this project is focusing on some aspect of the brain that
has yet to be studied (not very likely) it looks like this is just going to
take NIH funds away from researchers who are already working in these areas.
It doesn't surprise me though. Francis Collins (head of NIH) was the leader of
the publicly funded half of the Human Genome Project. I guess he's trying to
pull the same trick twice. It will be very interesting to see what the final
proposal looks like.

EDIT:

Also claims that "we'll be able to cure Alzheimers!" are pretty much part of
every grant proposal submitted to NIMH in one way or the other. It's just an
easy way to get your "impact on public health" covered. I can't believe
they're failing for it here.

~~~
ihnorton
Right, and people had been playing with rockets for 30 years before the Apollo
project. There is something to be said for large, concerted effort toward a
singular goal. There are still enough massive gaps in our understanding of the
brain to justify further research.

That said, this press speculation is just fluff and it's unclear to me whether
it is possible to define such a focused goal.

As an aside, I don't quite get all the cynicism in this thread. President: we
will spend more money on science! HN: Meh?

~~~
jpwagner

      President: we will spend more money on science! HN: Meh?
    

The cynicism is that all "science" is not equal. Correct or not, cantastoria's
criticism is that giving money to charlatans takes that money away from basic
research. A good counterargument would outline why "mapping the brain" is
possible and a good use of resources. Personally, I'm still waiting for that
from someone.

~~~
ihnorton

      Correct or not, cantastoria's criticism is that giving money to 
      charlatans takes that money away from basic research.
    

I don't understand who the supposed charlatans are. The basic scientists
lauded by cantastoria for doing existing research are almost certainly going
to get the lion's share of this new money.

    
    
      outline why "mapping the brain" is possible and a good use of 
      resources.
    

[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627312...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627312005181)

~~~
jpwagner

      ...are almost certainly going to get the lion's share of this new money.
    

Not sure why you think that.

Here's the pdf for your link (I can only guess that you find this paper
convincing): <http://bit.ly/Y2AXtz>

~~~
ihnorton

      Not sure why you think that.
    

Because that's how grant peer-review works? Who will compose the review panels
for this funding? Mostly the same people who already compose the review panels
for existing NIH/NINDS/etc. funding mechanisms.

    
    
      I can only guess that you find this paper convincing.
    

The nanoprobe and "complex emergent properties" stuff at the beginning are a
bit hand-wavy, but the concrete 5 and 10-year goals are sufficiently ambitious
while certainly not outlandish.

------
keypusher
While there has been a huge growth in brain research over the last decade or
so, the methods and analysis are still immature, and results are often quite
fuzzy (even if researchers would like their reviewers to believe otherwise).
There also doesn't seem to be a clear goal here, other than to throw a bunch
of money at some interesting questions. The Genome Project had the very clear
goal of mapping the human genome. The European project aims to simulate a
human brain. This just seems to be directing a lot of money at research which
is already being done.

That being said, I think there might be some very interesting opportunities
here for talented developers. When I worked in the field a few years ago, the
software used for this stuff was generally a lot of MATLAB scripts with C
subroutines held together by some scripting language duct tape (Python/Bash).
It was slow, it was buggy, we were basically writing documentation as we
figured it out ourselves, different labs had different methods and scripts and
in general it was kind of a mess. It's actually bad enough that there are
research grants out there to develop better analysis software. Most of the
researchers are trained in statistics, neuroscience, and psychology but have
very little programming experience. If you are interested in some of the
software that is out there right now, below is a partial list. Also, if you
are interested in this kind of research but can't contribute code-wise,
contact your local research university. They are always looking for test
subjects for this kind of stuff, you usually get paid pretty well
($50-100/hour for imaging studies) and you get some cool images of your own
brain out of it if you ask.

<http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm/>

<http://fsl.fmrib.ox.ac.uk/fsl/fslwiki/FSL>

<http://afni.nimh.nih.gov/afni>

<http://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/>

<http://nipy.sourceforge.net/>

<http://www.trackvis.org/>

~~~
simonster
I've thought a lot about why fMRI data analysis tools are so terrible, and
I've come up with a few reasons:

\- It's impossible to implement the algorithms for fMRI data analysis
efficiently in most "dynamic" programming languages due to the performance hit
you take from using a dynamic language. (It might actually be possible in
Julia, NumPyPy, Python with Numba, but these languages are not yet well-
established.) On the other hand, dynamic programming languages are much better
suited to exploratory data analysis than C is, so essentially all fMRI data
analysis ends up being a mixture of C code and glue code in some other
language. In this regard, I don't think SPM (MATLAB with C MEX files) is
really that bad. It's fast and it avoids having to read the data from disk
multiple times.

\- People use what the tools they know, not the tools that are best for the
job. FreeSurfer is a mess of C, C shell, and Tcl/Tk, but there's nothing else
that can visualize fMRI data with comparable ease and accuracy. Most people in
neuroimaging only know MATLAB, which is pretty terrible for analyzing large
data sets because it can't mmap files (and it doesn't have the language
features necessary to make this possible, and it's closed source).

\- Related to the above, it's easier to get funding to develop a novel
algorithm than to implement an existing algorithm in a way that makes it more
useful/accessible to researchers. I believe this is slowly changing.

\- There are a lot of different algorithms used for analyzing fMRI data, and
no single package implements all of them. The necessity of each algorithm
differs by lab and researcher, according to scientific necessity, personal
preference, or the conventions of their subfield. People end up writing their
own code to glue together methods from different analysis packages, which is,
again, often written using the wrong tools.

\- Us graduate students who know how to code well need to publish papers.
There is comparatively little incentive to publish code.

~~~
Retric
Let's add to that fMRI data is next to useless for actually studying the
brain. It can map large scale organisation, but it's like trying to measure
the economy based on which power stations are in use at any given time.

~~~
fluidcruft
You could learn quite a bit about the organization and function of a country
based on the temporal-spatial patterns of its energy consumption particularly
when you're given the power to control external stimuli. But yeah, it could be
pretty useless for studying something on the scale of a subdivision. It
depends entirely on which spatial scales you are interested in studying.

------
jahewson
I went to a fantastic talk by Microsoft Research's Stephen Emmott recently in
which he referred to fMRI as "phrenology for the 21st century" and advocated
the building of computational models of the brain. Mixed feelings about this
announcement - some of the newer methods do look promising.

~~~
etrautmann
The proposed research is not focused on fMRI...

------
mtgx
This sounds like a reactionary move after Europe announced their own. Can't
complain though. Great to see they are taking this sort of research seriously.
Now if they started funding international anti-asteroid systems, too (like how
Russia suggested), that would be great.

------
JoeAltmaier
Sounds like snake oil. Too early to build a complete human brain model.
Simpler brain models (cat, lizard) haven't been done yet (?) but that's not
headline-worthy.

How about "President announces program to solve all human suffering"? About as
meaningless, but would actually be more useful if by some astronomical fluke
they succeeded.

~~~
lars
It's on the same timescale as the European Blue Brain Project (and also
Kurzweil's predictions, if you put any faith in that). If you believe that
this an information technology that has an exponential growth, it's not a
sufficient objection that we're far off now. The same objections were raised
for the Human Genome Project, which was far from completion most of its
duration, but followed an exponential growth and completed on time.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Genome is a couple megabytes. Brain is terabytes. A billion times more
complex. And its not all about the chemistry, its about the physical wiring.
So the same techniques won't apply.

~~~
lars
Yes, but you only have to double a megabyte 30 times to get a terabyte. That's
a better perspective to take when dealing with exponential growth. Of course,
the genome and the brain are different things, but the point remains that if
you believe this will have an exponential growth, being far away from solving
it is exactly where you expect us to be right now. And even now, we do have
quite good computational models for certain small parts of the brain.

~~~
mortehu
> you only have to double a megabyte 30 times to get a terabyte.

It seems to be only 19.93 times according to Wolfram Alpha?

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=log%281+terabyte%2F1+me...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=log%281+terabyte%2F1+megabyte%29%2Flog%282%29)

~~~
lars
You're right, I assumed the billion times figure was correct, it should be a
million.

------
omnisci
It's clear that the software that we are using is not sufficient, and a lot of
it seems to be a lack of quality control. I've been in science now for close
to 10 years and the software that we use looks like it was built in 1995.

This is a serious problem with science software. The features are there (for
the most part), but it seems clear that much of the software engineers are not
working with the users. There is a severe lack of thought when it comes to UI
and as such the learning curve is pretty steep.

With that said, my first YC application was to build software (web based) to
tackle some of these issues. I'm actually looking for coders to help build
this product, so if you have any interest in jumping into this field, send me
an email (in profile). I intend on applying to YC this summer and would love
to work with a few programmers to give this project a real shot.

~~~
JohnnyBrown
I've spent some time making web-based software while sitting across the lab
from the scientists who use it. This looks like an interesting project, I'll
email you for more info.

------
gph
I may be way out of my depth on this, but isn't this project assuming that
there is a 'normative' human brain, and that we all have the same neuron
structure?

I know we all have the same general brain regions, and in most of us they
function approximately the same. But to go down to the neuronal-level will any
single brain be able to give a map that would be useful to the population as a
whole? Or are they planning on making some type of composite map from multiple
sources?

~~~
keypusher
I used to work in functional brain imaging (fMRI), so perhaps I can shed some
light on this. Generally what happens is you take a group of subject, and get
"structural" (anatomic) scans of their brain as well as the functional scans
showing brain activity for the given task. The structural scans are then run
through a statistical "normalization" procedure, which basically does some
fancy bending/warping of everyone's brains such that they all line up. Once
this is done you apply that normalization function to the functional scans so
you can compare everyone. It is also important to note that typically
neuroimaging does not go down the neuronal level, the resolution is just not
that high. Typically you are looking for brain regions, or sub-regions that
correlate with a given activity. Something on the order of millimeters to
centimeters. However there are other ways of investigating brain activity, and
some of those can go down to the neuronal level.

Here is an example of common software package to do such normalization and
analysis: <http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm/>

------
etrautmann
I'm currently working to develop neural prosthetics (computer cursor, robotic
arm, etc.) and it's clear to me that the president's proposed research will
have _real_ clinical impact over the timescale of 5-10 years. Our lab and
others already have paralyzed human patients controlling computers in clinical
trials via a brain-machine interface, but it is hard to overstate the
potential possibilities that remain hidden due to our lack of low-level
understanding of low level circuits.

To clear up some misconceptions in this thread, this new work is NOT focused
on top-down cognition using hand-wavy tools. Instead, it's focused on
understanding neural circuits starting with simple organisms and working up to
primates/humans by developing new technologies that allow us to radically
scale up the scope of question we can ask.

------
jivatmanx
I'm skeptical, but if it's reasonable to spend over a Trillion on a manned
fighter project (F-35) considering the pathetic state of that project, then
the few billion for this is worthwhile a million times over

~~~
adventured
How about neither.

The Paul Allen brain Atlas, among many other private initiatives, is capable
of pursuing this goal better than the federal government, in the same way and
for the exact same reasons that Craig Venter & Co. embarrassed the human
genome project.

~~~
muhfuhkuh
Actually, UC Santa Cruz and the NHGRI/NIH embarrassed Celera by publishing the
human genome and setting the whole thing public domain several days before
Celera could publish then patent their mappings. And, anyway, the only reason
Venter went private was to draw a line in the sand about shotgun sequencing,
for which he was having trouble finding public funding/support.

Besides, no one got into space faster than governments, no one has managed to
develop cures and vaccines for large-scale and deadly diseases than labs
directly funded by the NIH and other governmental agencies, and no one has had
the infrastructure to build large-scale networks like the Internet like
governments.

I won't even mention interstate/intercontinental highways, sewer systems,
healthcare outside of the US, etc. There are simply some things that cannot be
done by anyone but the uppercase-P People.

------
ibuildthings
<http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/cms/lang/en/pid/56882> Here are more details of the
European project (labelled Blue Brain Project) other posters had mentioned
about in this thread. Also, there is this TED talk
[http://www.ted.com/talks/henry_markram_supercomputing_the_br...](http://www.ted.com/talks/henry_markram_supercomputing_the_brain_s_secrets.html)
by Henry Markram, the project director of the blue brain project.

~~~
wfn
For anyone still curious after watching the TED talk, also see the Almaden
Cognitive Computing 2006 series - these presentations are technically intense
(cellular biology, beyond-pop neuroscience) but(/and) enjoyable. The second
one in the series is a lecture/presentation by the same Henry Markram:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gFI7o69VJM>

NB: intros (by those other people at the start of each video) tend to be long
(especially for the first presentation (which is by the way very interesting
as well)), I'd maybe skip them.

There are a couple of other videos from the series on youtube, but the
original collection of twelve was removed from google video once that service
became defunct. They are still available via somewhat obscure means from the
original source:

webpage (original now gone from the source for some reason) with links to
original AVIs and PPTs: <http://kostas.mkj.lt/almaden2006/agenda.shtml> ; I'm
redownloading those AVIs now just in case...
(www.almaden.ibm.com/institute/resources/2006/Disk[1-12].avi (replace integer
interval with a single integer.))

------
abecedarius
On the claimed $800 billion dollar return on the human genome project:
[http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110511/full/news.2011.281.ht...](http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110511/full/news.2011.281.html)
(It's skeptical but vague; it looked like the rest of the top hits just
parroted the press release.)

Anyone have access to the brain-mapping proposal?
[http://www.cell.com/neuron/abstract/S0896-6273%2812%2900518-...](http://www.cell.com/neuron/abstract/S0896-6273%2812%2900518-1)
"The function of neural circuits is an emergent property that arises from the
coordinated activity of large numbers of neurons. To capture this, we propose
launching a large-scale, international public effort, the Brain Activity Map
Project, aimed at reconstructing the full record of neural activity across
complete neural circuits. This technological challenge could prove to be an
invaluable step toward understanding fundamental and pathological brain
processes."

~~~
bnewbold
At columbia.edu via scholar.google.com:

<http://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac%3A147969>
[http://academiccommons.columbia.edu/download/fedora_content/...](http://academiccommons.columbia.edu/download/fedora_content/download/ac:147970/CONTENT/Neuroview_original.pdf)

~~~
abecedarius
Thanks!

On skimming it sounds well thought out as research on its own terms, though
the connection to curing diseases is just as handwavey.

------
chbrown
This sounds awfully familiar (Europe's a step ahead, this time, at least in
the press):

[http://uk.news.yahoo.com/billion-euro-supercomputer-to--
simu...](http://uk.news.yahoo.com/billion-euro-supercomputer-to--simulate-
entire-human-brain---120811728.html)

~~~
ihnorton
Not exactly.

    
    
      The Obama initiative is markedly different from a recently 
      announced European project that will invest 1 billion euros 
      in a Swiss-led effort to build a silicon-based “brain.” The 
      project seeks to construct a supercomputer simulation using 
      the best research about the inner workings of the brain.
    
      Critics, however, say the simulation will be built on 
      knowledge that is still theoretical, incomplete or 
      inaccurate.

------
tgflynn
This is great news. As skeptical as I am about the prospects for actually
simulating the human brain in the near future the benefits that are likely to
arise from devoting more resources to understanding it are enormous, both in
terms of technology and human health. This is probably one of the best things
the government could be spending research money on. I only hope that this
proposal is funded at the level it deserves.

------
MikeCapone
Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom's "Whole Brain Emulation Roadmap" might
interest some people here:

[http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/3...](http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/3853/brain-
emulation-roadmap-report.pdf)

Most of it is over my head, but it was an interest read and shows the kind of
techniques we'd need to be able to do this.

------
melipone
How will this help "paving the way for Artificial intelligence"? We already
have neural networks as a computational metaphor for the brain. I doubt we
will find new metaphors. I doubt we will learn new computational tricks.
Please enlight me on this issue.

~~~
return0
ANNs were build with the assumption of point neurons as nodes in a network and
many of their training algorithms are biophysically unrealistic. While ANNs
can be good function approximators, they are a very inaccurate representation
of brain neuronal neurons and networks (which have intricate dendrites and
biophysics). We don't know yet how fundamental processes like memory storage
work in the brain; it's one of the great mysteries of neuroscience.

------
xijuan
I agree with the skepticism in the other comments. But I still happy to hear
the news! We need more research on human brain! The more, the better! How
human brain works is still pretty much a mystery..

------
n3rdy
Do not let this man fool you. Our president has every intention of developing
a My Little Pony MMORPG once research is finished.

~~~
cmccabe
I bet you really wish HN comments allowed images.

------
AutoCorrect
How about a 10 year project to pay off the National Debt?

Quit wasting money on science projects that aren't needed (this is already
being done).

~~~
adventured
3% interest times $20 trillion = $600 billion per year in interest. (interest
rates will not stay this low indefinitely, and even 3% would be crazy low
given the actual default risk via inflation that the US poses)

That interest basis alone would effectively wipe out the ability to continue
Social Security (or almost the entire US military, take your pick).

The national debt can never be repaid under any circumstances. We can't afford
the real interest cost right now, which is why the Fed is paying for that via
debt monetization (aka QE). Throw in just a trillion per year in principle,
and it becomes a sad joke.

We will never, and have no plans to ever pay for the national debt. There's no
scenario under which the math works out, unless our government suddenly
becomes hyper disciplined and initiates an uncompromising 50 year payback plan
that takes a hatchet to the entire welfare state (corporate, social,
military).

------
monochromatic
Politicians gonna pander. In unrelated news, the sun rose as expected this
morning.

------
toisanji
maybe this is the science project to unite the US and push STEM forward.

------
contingencies
1984: We're behind schedule.

