Obama has consistently created history, and he did so once again. Brain Activity Map (BAM) is a project that aims to map each neuronal activity and connection in the human brain. The project ever since Obama compared it to the Human Genome Project at his State of union address is widely believed to have garnered funding by the US federal government. The ballpark figure that the Obama administration will allocate to this ambitious project is thought to cross over into a few billion dollars.

BAM was first proposed in September 2011 by the Kavli Foundation while they sought to bring together the worlds top talents in neuroscience and nano-science, in a project aimed at “recording from every neuron in the human brain at the same time” as it was put by the projects spearhead Yuste.

The human brain is thought to have a hundred billion neurons. Scientists and non-scientists have been forever intrigued with what makes humans humane, the answer obviously resides in the human brain. However the closest we have ever come to taking a look at the active human brain is through the techniques of EEG and fMRI, both of which have limitations. Neither of the technique allows a precise time locked understanding of individual neuronal activity neither do either of them come anywhere close to understanding how individual neurons speak to one another.

BAM hopes to not just understand the different kind of connections the different kind of neurons have in our brain but hopes to be able to decipher the neuronal messages and the neuronal language in order to understand how the human brain produces it’s thoughts and perceptions.

The human brain mapping project is an immense undertaking and requires a detailed road map. The road map to the eventual ambitious goal was laid out in a recent Neuron publication written by the scientists who initially proposed the project, Yuste and colleagues. The paper explains in detail the technological advances that would have to be made before the project can eventually map the neuronal individual and collective output. The team proposes a modest aim to first map the drosophila fly’s 135,000 or so neurons, and then to map the zebra fish and mouse. The next milestone would be the more ambitious mapping of a mammalian brain, the smallest being that of the etruscan shrew with one million neurons, and finally the human brain.

However many neuroscientists and psychologists have asked the crucial question on whether the sum of parts can ever equal the total when it come to an extremely complex puzzle as the human brain. Would mapping each neuron and its connection be enough to tell us what makes us humans? However, many are more worried about the eventual success of the project which not only seeks to map the brain but also seeks to learn how to control the human brain or to manipulate the neurons or to put it more bluntly, how to control the human mind.

Reference

Alivisatos AP, Chun M, Church GM, Greenspan RJ, Roukes ML, & Yuste R (2012). The brain activity map project and the challenge of functional connectomics. Neuron, 74 (6), 970-4 PMID: 22726828

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