Big brain science

The Brain Activity Map, an academic consortium that aims to measure and model all the connections in living brains, has garnered mass media attention and comparisons to the Human Genome Project. However, unlike mapping the relatively well-defined human genome, visualizing the brain's complete wiring faces severe technical challenges. Also, it is unclear what the outcome of such a project would be and whether it would get new treatments to patients faster than more focused research.

The project's leaders have proposed a timeline of about 20 years for developing the technology to collect and interpret data from human brains. Popular press coverage of the Brain Activity Map (BAM) has focused on the idea of being able to image the activity of the entire brain in real time but has largely overlooked the project's massive technical challenges...