BRAIN Project: What It Is And How It Aims To Map The Human Brain
The brain is a complex set of organs that performs various functions such as maintaining and regulating the different vital functions of the body, as well as psychic functions, being the organ in which people’s consciousness and mind reside. Nevertheless, There is still a long path of research into the brain which is why projects and research in this field have proliferated in recent years.
The BRAIN Project or the BRAIN initiative has been created in order to be able to map in three dimensions the simultaneous communications of thousands of neurons so that in the future specialists in the field will be able to understand more clearly the functioning of the human brain and thus advancing the prevention and treatment of various brain-related diseases (e.g., Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, etc.).
In this article We will see what the BRAIN Project consists of and what are the main objectives of this initiative.
The BRAIN Project, also known as the BRAIN initiative (“Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies” or “Brain Activity Map Project”), which could be translated into Spanish as “Brain research through the advancement of innovative neurotechnologies” or “Project brain activity mapping” is a human brain research initiative that was devised by the Spanish neurobiologist Rafael Yuste having been announced on April 2, 2013 by United States President Barack Obama.
The BRAIN initiative or Project is based on the objective of achieve a three-dimensional map of the activity of each neuron in the human brain, making it possible to record the communications of thousands of neurons at the same time; In other words, what this project seeks is to map all the neuronal activity of the human brain and, in this way, understand how the most mysterious organ of all works.
This research has been outlined in a 15-year plan, so It is expected to be completed in 2026 It has an initial investment of 100 million dollars in federal funding and that budget has been channeled through three agencies, which are the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the National Institutes of Health ( NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), also having various laboratories available around the world participating in the project.
Likewise, the BRAIN Project has also been funded by various private foundations such as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Allen Institute for Brain Science, the Kavli Foundation or the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, among others, so the amount The amount of money financed has risen considerably compared to what was initially invested.
BRAIN Project Objectives
The BRAIN Project is focused on developing a series of tools that enable scientists in charge of working and researching in the field of neuroscience and everything related to the human brain to achieve important discoveries, never achieved before.
The Spanish neurobiologist who works at Columbia University in New York, Rafael Yuste, affirms that The advances anticipated as a result of the BRAIN Project could in the future allow scientists to treat, cure and/or prevent brain disorders or diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, as well as traumatic injuries, in addition to providing in-depth knowledge about the basic science that studies and researches the functioning of the brain.
Another advance that is expected to be achieved thanks to the BRAIN Project is the development of different prostheses that help directly link the brain to the Internet, so that unprecedented advances are achieved that allow solving various problems that to date have been difficult to address. The researchers of this project hope that their research will offer the possibility of capturing real-time images of neural circuits at a speed similar to that of our thinking.
To achieve this, it has been necessary for various professionals to join the BRAIN Project, such as molecular biologists, neurobiologists, geneticists, mathematicians or computer scientists, among others, in an interdisciplinary collaboration that requires the invention of new techniques and the development of advanced technologies.
In addition to being able to map the 80 billion neurons and their connections, other advances expected in the coming years will be the proliferation of brain devices, so Project BRAIN researchers believe that the brain should be protected at a legislative level throughout the world neurorights should be included in the Charter of the United Nations in order to protect the activity and data of the brain when technological transplants are performed in the brain, and they should be considered and regulated as medical devices and not as technological consumer products.
Criticisms of the BRAIN project
Since Project BRAIN was announced in 2013, it has not been free from criticism, because many consider it too ambitious due to unrealistic expectations It has been argued that mapping such complex activity as that carried out by billions of brain neurons is not possible. On the other hand, there were those who did believe that it would be possible to achieve it but that it would entail high costs.
Others who saw it as feasible for the BRAIN Project to map neuronal activity considered that later They would encounter serious difficulties when managing and working with the large amount of data that they could obtain from a three-dimensional map of neural connections Based on these possible difficulties, Yuste and his collaborators affirm that they will need new technological tools and techniques that allow them to study the brain in greater depth, which will make it possible to move forward with the project.
There were also more critics regarding this project, arguing that even if they managed to map all the neuronal spikes simultaneously it would not be a complete record because it would be necessary to record at the same time the external stimuli to which the brain was exposed at that moment so that the brain could be analyzed and understood at a macroscopic level.
Achievements attributed to the project
In favor of the BRAIN Project, it is worth mentioning that in early 2021 Alipasha Vaziri and her team at Rockefeller University (USA) reported in an article that had managed to simultaneously record the activity of more than a million neurons in the cerebral cortex of a mouse, being the largest record of animal cortical activity that has been made to date. However, it is still quite far from what was promised when the project was announced when it was expected that they would be able to record the activity of millions of neurons in the human brain.
Another of the most important results that have been achieved in the BRAIN Project has been the development of a classification of the types of cells in the motor cortex of humans and mice which has allowed us to provide a great deal of knowledge about the way the brain is organized.
In the final phase of the BRAIN Project they will seek to understand how the different circuits of the brain work through a diagram of the interconnected neurons, with more modest objectives than the initial ones given that they have been able to observe throughout these years of research for understanding. of the brain should be a continuous task that should not have a deadline.
As we have seen, there is still a lot of ground to cover in the field of research on the brain and neurosciences and, although there are various lines of research that are very promising, we must be cautious because it is possible that these advances that are so widely They expect it could take longer than previously promised, or maybe not; In any case, there is still a long way to go in a field of research as curious, exciting and mysterious as the study of the human brain.
