BOSTON — The brain-mapping project that the Obama administration wants to facilitate isn't necessarily aimed at adding billions of dollars to the money already being spent on research, according to the scientists who inspired the idea. Instead, it's aimed at harnessing new technologies to uncover the secrets of neural function less expensively and more completely.

"We can bring down the cost and increase the quality of the technology," said Harvard geneticist George Church, one of the researchers who proposed the Brain Activity Map Project last year. "We are trying to work with current funding [levels] to bring down the cost."

The New York Times reported on Monday that the White House has embraced the idea of having the Office of Science and Technology Policy spearhead the project, with participation by the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies. The federal initiative is to be unveiled as early as next month, the Times quoted its sources as saying.

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The roots of the project go back months if not years earlier: The goals of the BAM Project were outlined last June in a white paper appearing in the journal Neuron. The researchers proposed a 15-year international effort to map the functions of the brain's complex neural circuitry to an unprecedented degree — using traditional tools such as magnetic resonance imaging in combination with novel technologies such as nanosensors and wireless fiber-optic probes that can be implanted into the brain, and genetically engineered cells that can be linked up with brain cells to record their activity.

The scientists' idea was to start with mice and work their way up to primates. "We do not exclude the extension of the BAM Project to humans, and if this project is to be applicable to clinical research or practice, its special challenges are worth addressing early," they wrote.

The discoveries generated by the effort could point to new strategies for dealing with brain-centered maladies such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, autism and schizophrenia.

Church and his colleagues compared the BAM Project's potential impact to the effects of the $3.8 billion Human Genome Project, a 13-year-long effort that analysts say generated $796 billion in economic activity. "After the genome project, we brought the cost [of whole-genome sequencing] down by a million-fold," Church said. Advanced technologies for studying brain activity could bring savings on the same scale, he said.

In this month's State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama made a similar point: "Every dollar we invested to map the human genome returned $140 to our economy — every dollar.  Today, our scientists are mapping the human brain to unlock the answers to Alzheimer's.  They’re developing drugs to regenerate damaged organs; devising new material to make batteries 10 times more powerful.  Now is not the time to gut these job-creating investments in science and innovation.  Now is the time to reach a level of research and development not seen since the height of the Space Race."

Debate over the dollars
The Times' report on the project quoted scientists familiar with the BAM Project as saying they hoped it would receive as much support as the Human Genome Project did, which amounted to more than $300 million a year. That was widely interpreted as implying that more than $3 billion would be shifted over to the effort from other federally supported research over the next decade – a prospect that rankled some observers.

"If there is money for frivolities like the Billion Dollar Brain Project, doesn't it show that NIH has too much money?" evolutionary geneticist Detlef Weigel of the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology wrote in a Twitter comment.

Some scientists noted that the European Union has already established a Human Brain Project in cooperation with a range of research centers, including some that are expected to play a role in the BAM Project. The European-led project is due to receive up to 1 billion euros ($1.3 billion) over the next decade.

Michael Eisen, a biologist at the University of California at Berkeley, pointed to a blog posting in which he said grand projects in biology such as Project ENCODE for DNA analysis were emerging as the "greatest threat" to individual discovery-driven science because they crowded out less costly, smaller-scale studies.

"It's one thing to fund neuroscience, another to have a centralized 10-year project to 'solve the brain,'" Eisen wrote in a Twitter update.

Emphasis on existing funds
Church said he couldn't speak for the federal government, and he didn't rule out the possibility that the project would receive new funding. But he noted that the concept outlined last year emphasized better coordination of existing publicly and privately supported brain research efforts, which already receive hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

"We want to use existing funds," he told NBC News.

The BAM Project received a strong endorsement from Allan Jones, chief executive officer of the privately backed Allen Institute for Brain Science.

"Our own work over the last 10 years has shown that large-scale brain research and sharing vast data sets and tools publicly for use by scientists around the world accelerate progress and catalyze important research advances across the field," Jones said in a statement emailed to NBC News. "In early 2012, we launched our large-scale initiative to understand brain activity, creating a foundation for other related projects."

The Allen Institute helped organize a workshop that gave rise to last year's white paper proposing the BAM Project, and it is also a partner in the Human Brain Project. Jones said such efforts "complement our work at the Allen Institute for Brain Science and hold promise for helping to bring on new discoveries about the human brain and bring us ever closer to much needed advances in medicine."

More about the brain:

• How scientists are hacking into brain waves
• Paul Allen starts up 'brain observatory' with $300 million
• Flash interactive: Road map of the mind
• Cosmic Log archive on brain science

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Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

BOSTON — Neuroscientists are following through on the promise of artificially enhanced bodies by creating the ability to "feel" flashes of light in invisible wavelengths, or building an entire virtual body that can be controlled via brain waves.

"Things that we used to think were hoaxes or science fiction are fast becoming reality," said Todd Coleman, a bioengineering professor at the University of California at San Diego. Coleman and other researchers surveyed the rapidly developing field of neuroprosthetics in Boston this weekend at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

One advance came to light just in the past week, when researchers reported that they successfully wired up rats to sense infrared light and move toward the signals to get a reward. "This was the first attempt … not to restore a function but to augment the range of sensory experience," said Duke University neurobiologist Miguel Nicolelis, the research team's leader.

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The project, detailed in the journal Nature Communications, involved training rats to recognize a visible light source and poke at the source with its nose to get a sip of water. Then electrodes were implanted in a region of the rats' brains that is associated with whisker-touching. The electrodes were connected to an infrared sensor on the rats' heads, which stimulated the target neurons when the rat was facing the source of an infrared beam. Then the visible lights in the test cage were replaced by infrared lights.

It typically took about four weeks of practice for the rats to figure out how to use their new infrared sensory system, but eventually the rats could respond to the invisible light as well as they responded to the visible light. Presumably, they could "feel" where the infrared flash was coming from, as part of their whisker-touching sense.

Nicolelis said the experiment showed that the brain is "much more plastic than we thought" when it comes to adapting to new stimuli.

That plasticity is the key to another set of experiments he and his colleagues have been conducting with rhesus monkeys, in which the monkeys learn to use their brain waves to control robotic arms or manipulate virtual objects on a computer screen. Over the years, Nicolelis' research team has developed a brain-cap system for monkeys that can pick up neural signals in almost 2,000 channels simultaneously, and send them wirelessly to a computer for processing. Nicolelis indicated that he was closing in on the goal of creating a system that could control a full-body exoskeleton.

"We can get animals to control the whole body now, when you get to the 1,000-neuron margin," he said.

Such work feeds into the Walk Again Project, a multinational effort to develop next-generation, full-body prosthetics for people with disabilities. Nicolelis wants to have an experimental brain-controlled exoskeleton ready in time to make its debut at next year's World Cup soccer finals, which are to be hosted by Brazil, Nicolelis' native country.

"We hope we will open the World Cup with a paraplegic young adult walking onto the field," he said.

Coleman, meanwhile, is working on ways to make brain-control devices less obtrusive. He is among several researchers who have been developing stamp-sized wireless sensors that can be worn like temporary tattoos. Such sensors can be used to monitor a person's medical signs — but if they're worn on the head, it's possible to pick up brain waves. In fact, Coleman found that the wireless tattoo sensors worked as well as the conventional, wired stick-on electrodes.

The results suggest that someday, it might be possible to develop a computer program to read the brain-wave patterns sent in by a tattoo on your forehead, and then fine-tune a virtual character to respond as if it was reading your thoughts.

The tattoos could have more down-to-earth applications in the medical field: In the future, such sensors could be used to monitor a newborn's brain for any signs of abnormality, or an older person's brain for signs of cognitive impairment.

"As we age, our ability to respond, or to modulate our attention to different new types of inputs, will start to slow down," Coleman said in a video interview distributed by AAAS. "Imagine if we could ... mount a sticker to the forehead that can provide quantitative outputs — measurements of that."

Does all this sound like a dream come true for the disabled, or a nightmare for folks worried about mind-reading robots? Feel free to weigh in with your thoughts in the comment section below.

More about the brain:

• Machine that feels is key to 'Jedi' prosthetics
• How scientists hacked into Stephen Hawking's brain
• Flash interactive: Road map of the mind
• Cosmic Log archive on brain science

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Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Scientists say our genes contain the hints of an evolutionary tug of war that took place in the wombs of our ancestors, balancing the drive to bigger brains with the need for a strong immune system.

The push and pull of these genetic variants apparently became more pronounced after pre-humans branched off from the ancestors of chimpanzees, according to biologists Peter Parham of Stanford University and Ashley Moffett of the University of Cambridge.

Two years ago, Parham and other researchers suggested that interbreeding with now-extinct cousins such as Neanderthals and Denisovans may have given early humans a boost of immunity. Parham says the same kind of cross-species hanky-panky may have played a role in the genetic diversity that he and Moffett discuss in a paper published online by Nature Reviews Immunology.

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"It quite nicely dovetails with all this other stuff," Parham told NBC News. "There is an inherent instability in the way the underlying mechanism works."

How natural killers work
The two biologists focus on how particular types of white blood cells, known as natural killer cells, work in the human immune system. In addition to fighting infections and tumors, natural killer cells help regulate the growth of the placenta during pregnancy. Humans are unique among primates in having two variants of the genes that control the receptors for natural killer cells.

"B haplotypes are favored during reproduction. A haplotypes are more specialized toward defending against infections," Parham explained. "These are subtle effects. On average, if you're an individual that has two A haplotypes and no B haplotype, you're going to have a slightly more robust immune system in terms of dealing with disease."

Having two B haplotypes, in contrast, would allow for a more robust placenta. That would provide the fetus in the womb with more of the nutrients needed to grow a bigger brain. "In the course of human evolution, you had the evolution of these B haplotypes, which really did enable the brain to get bigger. ... There are correlations between the size of the brain of the baby and these genetic factors," Parham said.

A detailed analysis of human genetic diversity suggests that the genes for the B haplotype emerged in the time frame lasting from about 7 million years ago to 1.7 million years ago. That would cover a period starting with the divergence of human and chimp ancestors, and ending with the human migration out of Africa.

The A-vs.-B breakdown is found in all present-day human populations, suggesting that both variants were important to have for different situations. Parham and Moffett speculate that the A variant was important when a population was facing a disease epidemic, while the B variant became important for brain-building once the epidemic passed.

The role of the birth canal
When our ancestors began walking upright, that introduced another push-pull effect for brain size. "It's difficult to document, but it's generally thought in the field of obstetrics that birthing is more difficult for humans than it is for other species," Parham said. The dimensions and layout of the human birth canal is one constraint: If a baby's skull were to get significantly bigger, it wouldn't fit through the canal.

Another constraint is pregnancy's effect on the mother's cardiovascular system. In some situations, a potentially fatal condition known as preeclampsia can occur.

"Part of the compromise is that the human population has tolerated a certain amount of death in childbirth, due to obstructed labor or preeclampsia. ... Both of these types of death in childbirth have been quite common in our species, as has been documented in so many 19th-century novels," Parham said.

The genetic record indicates that the human species passed through a series of "bottlenecks" in prehistoric times that reduced population diversity to perilously low levels. That's where interbreeding with Neanderthals could have played a part. "One way that modern humans replenished the genetic diversity lost in populations was through the selection of new variants ... another, and possibly more effective, mechanism was to acquire old variants by mating with archaic humans," Parham and Moffett write.

Today, modern medicine has leveled the evolutionary playing field. But in ancient times, all these genetic and physiological factors seem to have interacted to make our brains what they are today.

"Basically, we've got the nervous system and the brain putting pressure on the immune system and the reproductive system," Parham said.

More about human evolution:

• How sex with Neanderthals made us stronger
• Where did we get the energy for big brains?
• Brawn may have boosted the human brain

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Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Scientists have long suspected that big brains come with an evolutionary price — but now they've published the first experimental evidence to support that suspicion, based on their efforts to breed big-brained fish.

A Swedish team found it relatively easy to select and interbreed common guppies to produce bigger (or smaller) brains — as much as 9.3 percent bigger, to be precise. But the bigger-brained fish also tended to have smaller guts and produce fewer babies.

This finding is consistent with what's known as the "expensive-tissue hypothesis" — the idea that there's a trade-off between the demands of the brain and the demands of other organs. For example, we humans have bigger brains than other primates, relative to body size. About 20 percent of the energy we take in is used up by the brain, which represents just 2 percent fo our body mass. But the amount of energy devoted to digestion is smaller, relatively speaking.

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Some evolutionary biologists have speculated that when our distant ancestors shifted to an easier-to-digest diet, that freed up the energy for bigger brains. But that speculation has been based primarily on comparative studies of brain size and gut size as they are in present-day species. And some of the recent studies on the subject have been interpreted as refuting the expensive-tissue hypothesis.

Niclas Kolm and his colleagues at Uppsala University used artificial evolution — that is, selective breeding — to show the tissue trade-off in action. Their results were published online today by the journal Current Biology.

The experiment put 48 of the guppies through an underwater arithmetic test to see whether better cognitive abilities came with the bigger brains. It turned out that the brainier fish were better at learning to recognize how many geometric symbols were on a door in order to get to the food on the other side (at least if there were up to four symbols).

But in the gut-size department, the bigger-brained fish, especially the males, came up short (20 percent smaller for males, 8 percent for females). What's more, the big-brained fish had 19 percent fewer offspring than the small-brained fish. That result suggests that bigger brains are somehow associated with smaller broods — a phenomenon that researchers have noticed with regard to primates as well as cetaceans.

Although the raw numbers seem to support the expensive-tissue hypothesis, Kolm and his colleagues weren't able to tease out the genetic mechanism for the trade-off. Thus, it's not fully clear which comes first: smaller guts or bigger brains. 

"Our results on the guppies demonstrate that the order of evolutionary transitions is starting with a change in brain size, followed by a decrease in gut size," Kolm told NBC News in an email. "At the same time, this does not automatically mean that the opposite response is not also possible. To test this would of course require further experiments. Currently, our cautious conclusion is that we have identified a new possible direction of events in that selection for increased brain size may indeed have 'forced' a reduction in gut size."

The same caveat goes for the findings on reproduction. Kolm said he and his colleagues interpret their results as supporting the view that reduced reproductive capacity is one of the evolutionary costs associated with bigger brains.

"This would seemingly suggest a lower fitness in large-brained individuals, which would not be intuitively 'possible' from an evolutionary point of view," Kolm acknowledged. "Here it is important to remember that in our selective set-up, we have no additional selection pressures from avoiding predators, finding food, competing for mates, etc., that would occur in the natural environment. Hence, there might still be an overall fitness benefit from increased brain size in the wild, at least in certain environments/situations, that would allow selection for increased brain size despite the lowered fecundity."

The Swedish researchers are planning a new round of experiments to see how big-brained (and small-brained) guppies handle a more realistic evolutionary environment.

"Watch this space," Kolm said.

More about brains and evolution:

• How diet affected human evolution
• Theory says humans are losing intelligence
• Flash interactive: Take a tour of your brain
• Gallery: The 10 smartest animals

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In addition to Kolm, the authors of "Artificial Selection on Relative Brain Size in the Guppy Reveals Costs and Benefits of Evolving a Larger Brain" include Alexander Kotrschal, Björn Rogell, Andreas Bundsen, Beatrice Svensson, Susanne Zajitschek, Ioana Brännström, Simone Immler and Alexei Maklakov.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Sympathetic jurors show a characteristic pattern of brain activity when they decide to be lenient on a criminal, and the strength of that pattern can vary from juror to juror, researchers report. Such findings aren't of merely academic interest: Someday, this kind of neuroscience could well have an impact on the legal process itself.

The latest study, published today in the journal Nature Communications, is consistent with earlier research into the neurological roots of moral cognition. It's also in line with the well-supported view that mitigating circumstances can make a big difference when people consider how other people should be punished. This study, led by Makiko Yamada of Japan's National Institute of Radiological Sciences, bridges the gap by investigating how the brain turns information about mitigating circumstances into a legal outcome.

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"Jurors are really like workers," Caltech neuroscientist Colin Camerer, one of the study's co-authors, told me. "They're chosen and instructed to do things with quite a bit of restraint. It's like you're 'hiring' these workers to do something that's literally life and death. But almost nothing is known about whether they're using their tools — brain activity — in an appropriate way."

To study that question, Yamada and her colleagues recruited 26 subjects to read 32 real-life stories about Japanese defendants facing sentences for murder. Half of the stories presented scenarios that were likely to elicit sympathy — for example, tales of life in poverty, or victimization by domestic violence, or a struggle with disease. The other half were "no-sympathy" scenarios.

After reading the stories, the subjects were put into MRI scanners and asked to modify a 20-year sentence for each defendant, either up or down. Then they rated themselves on how much sympathy they felt for the defendants, and how empathetic they considered themselves to be. Readings from three of the subjects were not included in the analysis because they moved excessively during the brain scans, and one subject fell asleep during the experiment. That left 22 people in the study.

The MRI results showed that brain areas known as the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, the precuneus and temporo-parietal junction were activated during a sympathetic response, and that the precuneus and anterior cingulate cortex were activated during sentencing. These regions are generally associated with mental deliberation and moral conflict, as well as emotional pain.

The jurors who were more inclined to be lenient tended to show more activity in the right middle insula, an area known to be involved in the mental perception of visceral states. Camerer said the most sympathetic subject, as measured by brain activity, exhibited a 28-year range in sentencing: six years for the most forgivable murderer, and 34 years for the least forgivable. The jurors with the least sympathetic brains kept their sentences in a 10-year range — for example, from 15 to 25 years.

"This kind of variability is similar [but] probably much less than that seen in experimental studies of translating moral judgments to large dollar sums in punitive-damage tort cases," Camerer said.

The researchers said the variability in brain function could become a factor in future court cases. "Not every brain maps sympathy to prison sentences in the same numerical way. ... Differences in these brain circuits between individuals suggest that differential juror responses might need to be considered unequally," they wrote.

Camerer said another intriguing issue has to do with how individual jurors activate or deactivate their emotions during a criminal case. When they deliberate over a defendant's guilt or innocence, jurors are expected to hold their emotions in check. But when jurors consider the sentence of a convicted criminal, their emotional response to mitigating circumstances should become part of the  process.

"I could imagine where, on appeal, the argument would be that some of these jurors didn't override their emotions adequately," Camerer said. "If that's permitted as a legal issue, how do you know? We say, don't ask the person, ask the brain."

In the future, will jurors find themselves subjected to brain scans before or after a trial? If you were a defense lawyer, wouldn't you want to know you had 12 sympathetic brains on your side? If you were a prosecutor, wouldn't you want to make sure that jurors didn't let their right middle insula unduly influence their right temporo-parietal junction? Or does all this sound way too Orwellian? Feel free to weigh in with your verdict below.

More on your moral brain:

• Behaving badly? Blame your brain
• How monkeys handle moral outrage
• Judges are less lenient when they're hungry
• Study: Morality can be altered with magnets
• Brain's 'cheat sheet' makes moral decisions easier
• Flash interactive: Road map to the brain
• Mental health coverage on msnbc.com
• Cosmic Log archive on the brain

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In addition to Yamada and Camerer, the authors of "Neural Circuits in the Brain That Are Activated When Mitigating Criminal Sentences" include Saori Fujie, Motoichiro Kato, Tetsuya Matsuda, Harumasa Takano, Hiroshi Ito, Tetsuya Suhara and Hidehiko Takahashi.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

Software billionaire Paul Allen is pledging $300 million to establish a series of "brain observatories" at the Seattle research facility named after him, with the aim of mapping and manipulating the mouse brain.

The project's leaders say the insights gained could be applied as well to higher forms of life, including humans. "We believe that this project has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of the mammalian brain," Christoph Koch, chief scientific officer for the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and Harvard neuroscientist R. Clay Reid said in the journal Nature.

Details about the brain observatory project were laid out today at the Allen Institute in Seattle. In an advance interview, Koch cast the effort in terms usually reserved for the multibillion-dollar Hubble Space Telescope project or the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider.

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"We're focusing a huge amount of resources on trying to understand this piece of highly, highly complex math and science. The most organized piece of matter in the known universe is the cerebral cortex, the one that makes you and me think and smell and hear and talk. That's what we're trying to understand," Koch told me. "Just as people spend a huge amount of time and effort to build these different observatories to look at the origin of space and time, we're going to build these observatories, these very sophisticated instruments, all of them using common standards, all peering at the brain — primarily animal brains, but also the human brain."

In a way, seeking out the secrets of the brain is harder than looking for the Higgs boson, because neuroscientists have not yet developed a model for brain function as robust as, say, the Standard Model of particle physics. "In that sense, neuroscience may never have the maturity of physics, partly because the system we're dealing with is enormously more complex," Koch said.

The brain observatory project plans to start with the visual cerebral cortex of the mouse brain, because that's an area that neuroscientists understand relatively well, Koch said. Researchers from outside institutions could work with the Allen Institute's staff, using sophisticated instruments to light up the electrical circuitry of individual neurons, trace the connections between neurons, and watch how thousands of brain cells respond to specific stimuli.

All these techniques would be stitched together to produce a full physiological and structural characterization of entire brain regions. Such insights should lead to better computer models for brain function, which can be fed back into the experimental side of the project for validation. Having the firepower for computer modeling right next door to the experimental labs should produce "a virtuous circle that will be iterated until the model faithfully reproduces the data," Koch and Reid wrote.

From mice to humans
An estimated 60,000 neuroscientists are studying the brain at 10,000 labs worldwide, but the brain-observatory approach should be "very complementary" to those widely distributed efforts, said Allan Jones, the Allen Institute's chief executive officer. The institute's findings, including genetic atlases of the mouse brain and the human brain, are traditionally shared openly with other researchers, even before journal publication.

Koch compared the mouse brain to a set of 100 billion Lego toy blocks, organized into 1,000 different kinds of blocks. "First we need to understand how many different parts are out there, and then how they fit together," he said.

The insights gained from the visual cortex could be applied to further exploration of other functional areas of the mouse brain, and then to other mammalian brains — including our own brains. When it comes to cortical structure, "there isn't anything particularly unique about us," Koch said. "The principles are all going to be the same. ... If we understand them in a simpler system, then we are a long way toward understanding us."

Another aspect of the project is the development of lab-grown human brain cells that reflect the genetic components associated with neurological conditions ranging from autism to Alzheimer's. Stanford neuroscientist Ricardo Dolmetsch, a specialist in that technique, will be joining the Allen Institute later this year, as will Harvard's Reid.

During today's briefing in Seattle, Allen said his interest in brain research stems from his work in computer software, as a founder of Microsoft Corp. and other ventures. (Microsoft is one of the partners in the msnbc.com joint venture.) He noted that the most advanced software doesn't come close to matching the complexity of the human brain.

"There is really no greater challenge, with potentially huge impact, than understanding how brains work," he said. Allen said he was also motivated by the fact that his mother suffers from Alzheimer's disease. But he emphasized that the institute would focus on basic research rather than disease treatment.

"Our dream is to one day uncover the essence of what makes us human — to explore and understand how the brain makes us remember, forget, interact with each other and become the people we are," Allen said.

Ten-year plan
Allen's $300 million pledge will be spread out over four years to jump-start the Seattle institute's initial 10-year plan for the observatories. The software executive, whose net worth was recently estimated at $13.2 billion, founded the institute in 2003 with a $100 million contribution, and has donated an additional $100 million since then.

"My commitment today doesn't just continue the work of the institute," Allen said. "It greatly expands the scale and the scope of our mission."

The Allen Institute says it will use some of the money to double its staff to more than 350 employees over the next four years, as well as to develop new suites of instruments and new computer-modeling capabilities.

Leroy Hood, president and co-founder of the Seattle-based Institute for Systems Biology, said he was looking forward to collaborating with the Allen Institute's researchers on the brain observatory project.

"I think it's a terrific project," Hood told me. "Their approach to 'big science' and openness is exactly what's needed to move the field forward."

In addition to Allen's contributions to neuroscience, the billionaire has pursued a wide variety of interests beyond software, including ownership of the Portland Trail Blazers basketball team and the Seattle Seahawks football team, the establishment of the Allen Telescope Array, and financial backing for SpaceShipOne's prize-winning rocket venture and the Stratolaunch air-launch company.

Back in 2008, I set up a scale of financial denominations for big scientific projects, ranging from 1 allen (the estimated cost of the SpaceShipOne project, $25 million to $30 million) to 1 apollo ($100 billion or more). On that scale, Allen's contribution to the brain observatory project equals roughly 10 allens, or three-quarters of a rover (the $400 million Opportunity rover, that is, not the $2.5 billion Curiosity rover). Still more money will be needed for the out-years of the project, perhaps including government funding.

Is this project worth the price tag? How will it mesh with other potential neuroscience projects, such as the proposed billion-dollar European Human Brain Project? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

Update for 6:30 p.m. ET: At today's Seattle news briefing, I asked Koch what the top technology on his wish list would be. "We'd like to listen to every single nerve cell," he replied. "Right now, we can't do that." He envisions some sort of wireless receiver system that would have so much resolution that it could monitor individual neural impulses inside your head. Sounds pretty science-fictional to me, but what do you think?

Also, this week's issue of Nature includes a report on the $40 million Human Connectome Project, a five-year, $40 million initiative funded by the National Institutes of Health to map the brain's long-distance communication network. Some researchers wonder whether the project is really ready for prime time. "I would do the basic neuroscience before I started running lots of people through MRI scanners," David Kleinfeld, a researcher in physics and neurobiology at the University of California at San Diego, is quoted as saying.

Is this the decade of big-science brain research? That's one more question to chew over in the comment section.

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Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

After six years and several million dollars, scientists have created a 3-D model of a rat brain circuit.

The accomplishment is a first step toward creating a complete computer model of the brain that will allow a deeper understanding of how our noggins work — and what causes them to malfunction, according to the scientists behind the feat.

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For a starting point, researchers at the Max Planck Florida Institute are focused on how the rat brain processes information gathered by a single whisker.

They did so because studies in their lab and elsewhere have shown that a single whisker is able to detect, in complete darkness, whether a gap is safe to jump over and, if so, trigger the order to jump. 

What's more, there's a specific region of the brain "that is dedicated to processing information from a dedicated whisker," Marcel Oberlaender, a researcher at the institute and the first author of a paper explaining the research in the journal Cerebral Cortex, told me today.

That region is called the cortical column, a vertically-organized series of connected neurons that form a brain circuit and an elementary building block of the cortex. 

The cortex is the part of the brain responsible for many of the higher functions, such as memory and consciousness.

To build the model, the researchers studied the cortical column in awake and anesthetized rats as well as brain slices and then used computer software and other tools to reconstruct it.

"The model we built is really based on a complete reconstruction of these nerve cells," Oberlaender said. "So how the model looks in the end resembles how it would look in the real animal."

It is composed of 16,000 neurons, each of which can be divided into one of nine different cell types that has characteristic functional, structural and connectivity properties, he added.

The model can now be used to run computer simulations that show, in realistic detail, how signals flow within the brain. So, they can begin to understand, for example, what neurons fire as the rat detects the gap and decides whether or not to jump.

Until now, researchers have only been able to see how a single neuron or a small group of neurons interact during such a process. "We can now, in simulation experiments, mimic what is really going on in these circuits," Oberlaender said.

Going forward, the researchers should be able to use the methodology developed to build this model to add more parts to it, thus incorporating other brain functions such as the motor system that sends a signal down the spinal cord and makes the limbs move so that rat can jump over the gap.

More on brain science and technology:

• 3-D brain model could revolutionize neurology
• Test-tube brain aces 'plop' quiz
• 'Brain in a dish' may lead to stroke recovery
• Cat brain inspires computer of the future
• IBM unveils brain-like chip
• Breakthrough chip mimics human brain function

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

 

What's on your mind as you drive down the road? Cars of the future may tap into those thoughts in order to keep you and our roads safer.

The technology builds on brain-machine interface research pioneered at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland that allows wheelchairs users to get around using their minds. 

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Now, in collaboration with Nissan, the team has announced the car and driver is the next frontier.

"The idea is to blend driver and vehicle intelligence together in such a way that eliminates conflict between them, leading to a safer motoring environment," Jose del Millan, who the EPFL researcher leading the project, said in a media statement.

The system will measure brain activity, eye movement patterns, and the environment around the car to predict what the driver plans to do — such as turn left or change lanes to pass a slowpoke — and then help the driver make the move.

The idea of cars that help drivers get along down the road isn't entirely new. Earlier this year, we reported on a group of German researchers who have a car that turns left and right using brain waves.

More stores on cars, technology, and mind control:

• Leave the driving to your brain
• Man controlled robotic hand with thoughts
• Honda says brain waves control robot
• Taxicab data helps ease traffic

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.

 

Lefties were as outnumbered 600,000 years ago as they are today, according to telltale markings on teeth found on Neanderthal and Neanderthal ancestors in Europe.

The finding serves as a new technique to determine whether a person was left- or right-handed from limited skeletal remains, and it also suggests that a key piece for the origin of language was in place at least half a million years ago, David Frayer, an anthropologist at the University of Kansas, told me today.

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But while ancient righties appeared to outnumber lefties nine to one, the findings don't reveal whether some of the ancient lefties dominated in sports, as baseball players do today; and in politics, where being left-handed seems to help open the door to the White House.  

Tooth markings
The telltale tooth markings, based on experiments, appear to result from how these Neanderthals and their relatives processed hides with stone tools, explained Frayer, a co-author of a paper on the findings published this month in the journal Laterality.

One of his colleagues in Spain had people wear a mouth guard and then strike a hide as if they were cutting or stretching it with a stone tool. Every now and then, the test subjects were asked to whack their guarded teeth, as the researchers think would have accidentally happened as the ancient humans worked away.

Imagine a person pulling on the hide with their left hand and striking it with a tool held in their right hand. When they accidentally hit a tooth, the angle of the strike would be from the upper left to the lower right, Frayer explained.

"It doesn't matter what tooth it was, it would always be in that direction," he told me. "That tells you if you see scratches that are running in that direction, it tells you that the individual was primarily using their right hand to process."

Markings primarily going the opposite way — from the upper right to the lower left — are the sign of a lefty.

Frayer and colleagues examined isolated teeth from 27 Neanderthal and Neanderthal ancestors from Europe dating back 600,000 years and found that 25 of them have the telltale markings of a righty.

"That's the pattern we see in modern populations," Frayer noted, suggesting that right-handed dominance is an ancient human trait.

Language link
Although some studies of tool-using chimpanzees suggest a preference for the left hand, the ratio isn't as sharp as 9 to 1, according to Frayer. Such a distinctive ratio of handedness is unique to humans and their immediate ancestors and relatives.

And such laterality, he adds, appears linked to the development of language, a skill that humans have and chimps don't.

"The connection is the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body, and language is located on the left side," Frayer said.

We know this because when people experience a stroke on the left side of the brain, their speech is impaired and they lose control of the right side of their body. A person who has a stroke on the right side of the brain retains the ability to talk, but loses control of the left side of their body.

Finding that right-handedness goes back at least 600,000 years thus suggests that this key piece for language was in place, "so the people probably spoke," Frayer said.

More stories on handedness:

• Tool using chimps mostly lefties, study finds
• Hand preference in humans, animals explained
• Brain zap may improve righties' use of left hand
• Left handed hitters have a built in advantage

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).