MGH-UCLA Human Connectome Project

This visualization shows the grid structure of major pathways of the human brain, as mapped by the NIH Blueprint Human Connectome Project. Click on the image for a Flash interactive exploring the brain.

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.

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

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.

Dognition

Duke neuroscientist Brian Hare tests a dog's cognition using a simple set of toys.

Is your dog an Einstein or a Charmer? For $60 (woof!!), a new business venture called Dognition will help you put your pooch through a series of fun playtime activities to find out how your dog thinks. The metrics generated by those experiments … I mean, fun playtime activities … are being fed into a research project that could for the first time determine how the cognitive traits of various breeds differ.

"Dognition.com is ultimately about people's dogs, and finding out about your dog," Duke University neuroscientist Brian Hare, one of the venture's co-founders, told NBC News. "That's what you're paying for. I buy fancy dog food for my dog, and just like I want to take care of his stomach, I want to take care of his mind, too. Skip the next couple of chew toys, and your dog and you will really enjoy doing something a little different."

The business venture builds on Hare's work as the director of the Duke Canine Cognition Center and an associate professor in evolutionary anthropology at Duke's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. It also meshes with a newly published book by Hare and his wife, Vanessa Woods, titled "The Genius of Dogs."

How smart are dogs?
Don't expect Dognition's cognitive assessment to measure your pet's IQ: Hare says a dog's intelligence can't be described with a single number. (Come to think of it, the same caveat should apply to humans.)

"Because we use standardized testing in all walks of life, it leads you to believe that there's just one measure of intelligence, and there's a number, and that's it," Hare said. "But when you start studying cognitive science, and look at other species, that all starts to crumble."

It's also fruitless to try calculating whether dogs are smarter than cats, or chimps, or bonobos. "That's like trying to answer the question, 'Is a hammer better than a screwdriver?'" Hare said. Instead, he and his colleagues look at how dogs and other species address problem-solving challenges and communicate with humans. It turns out that dogs are geniuses when it comes to figuring out what humans are trying to tell them — which suggests that our world is truly going to the dogs.

"Dogs are bizarrely successful," Hare said. "They have more jobs than ever in this age of the Internet and the International Space Station."

Researchers have even argued that humans and dogs are locked in a co-evolutionary embrace that began tens of thousands of years ago. Last month, for example, one research team determined that canine digestive systems have adapted to the relatively starchy diet served up by modern humans.

How it works
Hare's research into dog cognition began back in 1995, with studies of how dogs looked for hidden treats when humans tried giving them hints. Those experiments, which are done using simple household items such as plastic cups (plus tons of treats), are laid out in Dognition's Canine Assessment Toolkit.

After you plunk your money down, Dognition's website takes you through a personality questionnaire about your dog: For example, how excited does your dog get around other dogs, grown-ups, children? Do fireworks scare your pup? Then, Dognition guides you through a battery of tests that are as fun as playing fetch, or hide-and-seek. The results are uploaded to Dognition HQ, and you get back a detailed profile of your dog's mental habits, based on where Fido's performance ends up on a chart of independent vs. social problem-solving skills.

Different areas of the chart are associated with nine different canine archetypes: Ace, Stargazer, Maverick, Charmer, Socialite, Protodog, Einstein, Expert or Renaissance Dog. That can give you something to brag about on Dognition's Facebook page, but it also can shed new light on why dogs do the things they do, or how you can get through to them better. "We've got a bunch of really fantastic trainers who have signed up to help," Hare said.

Researchers get a reward as well: The data from hundreds of Canine Assessment Tests can be correlated with breed, age and other factors. "To collect the amount of data we've taken in during our month-long beta program would have taken us a couple of years," Hare said.

Eventually, Hare and his colleagues hope to map out the substantive cognitive differences between dog breeds — differences that have not yet been studied scientifically. "The reason we don't know anything about breed differences is that we currently don't have the tools available to look at the number of dogs that would allow us to answer the interesting questions," Hare said.

Dognition could fix that. And it also could open up new possibilities for some of humanity's best friends.

"One of the things we're hoping to do is, suppose there's that dog that may not be the most attractive dog physically, but the dog is wonderfully behaved," Hare said. "What Dognition.com can do is help people understand more about what's inside that dog, and not just its physical appearance — and see that, wow, this dog is amazing."

More about dog intelligence:

• Dog's vocabulary makes her a star
• Gallery: Cat vs. dog intelligence
• The world's 10 most intelligent animals
• How smart is your dog? Give him an IQ test

Dognition offers a $59.95 Canine Assessment Toolkit as well as a $129.95 annual membership bundle that includes enhanced games and other goodies.

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.

Revelations about the solar system's icy frontier, carbon-based nanostructures and the neurological basis of perception and decision have brought global recognition to seven researchers who are sharing in this year's three $1 million Kavli Prizes.

The prizes have been awarded every other year since 2008 for pioneering work in three areas of research: astrophysics, nanoscience and neuroscience. The program is a partnership involving the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, the Kavli Foundation and the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research.

The Norwegian academy receives nominations from their colleagues in other countries and forwards them on to prize committees who recommend the winners. Much of the money for the awards is put up by the foundation, created by Norwegian-born industrialist/philanthropist Fred Kavli.

Here are the winners of this year's prizes, announced on Thursday:

Astrophysics
Planetary scientists David Jewitt, Jane Luu and Mike Brown share the $1 million astrophysics prize "for discovering and characterizing the Kuiper Belt and its largest members, work that led to a major advance in the understanding of the history of our planetary system." The Kuiper Belt is an icy ring of material on the outskirts of the solar system, between 30 and 50 AU. (One AU, or astronomical unit, equals the distance from Earth to the sun.) UCLA's Jewitt and MIT's Luu found the first Kuiper Belt object beyond Pluto in 1992. Caltech's Brown led a team that found numerous large Kuiper Belt objects, including one that's more massive than Pluto. Brown's discovery of the world now known as Eris led to Pluto's reclassification as a dwarf planet in 2006, but I don't hold that against him.

Kavli Prize

Winners of the Kavli Prize for Astrophysics: UCLA's David Jewitt, MIT's Jane Luu, Caltech's Mike Brown.

Earlier in the week, Jewitt and Luu were awarded the $1 million Shaw Prize in Astronomy for their study of trans-Neptunian bodies. Jewitt told Physics World it was "very flattering" to receive such rich honors from two independent prize committees almost simultaneously.

Kavli Prize

MIT's Mildred Dresselhaus

Nanoscience
MIT physicist Mildred Dresselhaus will receive the nanoscience prize "for her pioneering contributions to the study of phonons, electron-phonon interactions, and thermal transport in nanostructures." Over the course of five decades, Dresselhaus has come up with a steady stream of insights revealing how the properties of materials at the nanometer scale can be radically different from their properties at larger scales. Her early work on carbon fibers and materials known as graphite intercalation compounds laid the foundation for later discoveries relating to buckyballs, carbon nanotubes and graphene. (Graphene was the focus of a Nobel Prize awarded in 2010.)

Kavli Prize

The 2012 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience goes to Rockefeller University's Cornelia Bargmann, Winfried Denk of the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research and MIT's Ann Graybiel.

Neuroscience
Cornelia Bargmann, Winfried Denk and Ann Graybiel share the neuroscience prize "for elucidating basic neuronal mechanisms underlying perception and decision." Rockefeller University's Bargmann used nematode worms to study the molecular controls for animal behavior, including the role of odorant receptors, sensory neurons and the neurotransmitters involved in behavioral adaptation following experience. Denk, a resercher at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research, developed two techniques for studing how information is transmitted from the eye to the brain. MIT's Graybiel traced neural loops connecting the outer brain with an inner region known as the striatum. Such loops form the basis for linking sensory cues to actions involved in habitual behaviors.

Norway's King Harald V will present the prizes to the laureates during a Sept. 4 ceremony in Oslo.

Update for 10 p.m. ET June 2: The prize announcement was made during a webcast from the Norwegian Academy of Letters and Science in Oslo that was beamed to the World Science Festival in New York. One of the laureates, Cornelia Bargmann, was in attendance for the announcement. Check out the archived video of the event, and if you're in New York this weekend, check out the festivities at the science festival. It's also worth noting that on the other side of the country, a month-long science fest is just starting up in Seattle.

More about scientific prizes:

• Nobel laureates say we must fund dark energy research
• Three scientists win Nobel for discovering cosmic speedup
• Vindicated! Ridiculed Israeli chemist wins Nobel Prize

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 and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Memrise

A mnemonic device shows the transition between a picture depicting strength and the Mandarin character for strength. Such devices help us remember words, according to the founders of Memrise, a website that teaches you words of a foreign language.

For adults, learning a new language is often a long, frustrating process that inevitably ends up in failure. A memory expert and a neuroscientist hope to change that with a new online software package designed to make learning the vocabulary of a foreign language fast, fun and rewarding.

"Really good successful learning needs to be vivid, imaginative and creative. It needs to be active. And if you can make it a bit social, that's great," Greg Detre, a neuroscientist and co-founder of Memrise, the online destination to learn foreign words quickly, told me today.

The website is built on the metaphor that our minds are gardens where memories are either flourishing or wilting. When users learn a new word, they get a seed that they tend and grow into a healthy plant by correctly passing well-timed tests that force the users to recall the word.

To help users learn the word, the site offers up mnemonic devices. When learning the word man in Mandarin, for example, Memrise transforms the character for man into a cartoon of a man. Users are also encouraged to come up with their own devices. These devices, the founders say, make the words stick in your mind and enriches the recall experience. 

To help plant and tend the memory, the site uses an algorithm that tests you on the word when the memory of it is most likely fading your mind.

"It is trying to teach you how your memories work," Detre explained. "If you don't nurture them on a scientific schedule, they die just like flowers. But we are also at the same time trying to make your learning visible and social and useful."

The fun part hinges on choreography behind the scenes that props the tests at the time and a level of difficulty where you have to work a bit to get the answer, but that you will likely get it right. In other words, the tests make you feel like a genius, which feels good, so you keep on learning. If the tests were too hard or too easy, you might quit, Detre noted.

The site also lets you play along with friends and strangers. Comparing your garden with others fires up the competitive spirit, for example. Users can also share mnemonic devices and encourage each other to learn new words, fostering a sense of community.

Memrise bills itself as teacher of words in a foreign language. "That's only a small part of learning a language," Luis Von Alm, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and co-creator of another online learning website, Duolingo, told Technology Review.

Detre agrees that Memrise alone will not teach you a new language, but, in his opinion, is the "best way to learn the words of a new language." And learning vocabulary, he added, is "the right way for the brain to kick itself into learning a new language."

More on language and learning:

• A baby's babble leads to language
• English won't dominate as world language
• Robots invent their own spoken language
• What language do we use with E.T.?

Tip o' the Log to Technology Review's Kristina Bjoran

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).

Wan et al. / Science / AAAS

Functional MRI brain scans show activation in an area of the brain known as the precuneus, as exhibited here by a professional shogi player when presented with a board game pattern.

If you have a knack for knowing just the right move to make — in a board game or in other walks of life — it might be because your brain has built up a special kind of connection.

Researchers at Japan's RIKEN Brain Science Institute report evidence that the professional players of a chesslike board game from Japan, known as shogi, have brains that crackle with activity in two areas that are less active in amateurs. Their findings are published in this week's issue of the journal Science.

The activity was monitored using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, while professionals and amateurs were shown pictures of shogi board patterns. Shogi is regarded as a game as cerebral and as tricky to master as chess — perhaps even more tricky, because players can add pieces captured from an opponent to their own side. The professionals were more adept at intuitively recognizing the "next best move" for a given pattern, but the really interesting part of this game had to do with what went on in their brains.

Wan et al. / Science / AAAS

This fMRI scan highlights activity in the caudate nucleus of a professional shogi player.

The pros' brains showed more activity in the precuneus region of the parietal lobe, which has been linked to pattern recognition, as well as in the head of the caudate nucleus, deep within the brain. The caudate nucleus has been previously linked with cognitive functions, and game-playing in particular In fact, a different team of researchers reported last year that people who showed an aptitude for arcade games tended to have a bigger caudate nucleus (along with other structures) than less skilled players.

The research team found that the precuneus-caudate connection showed up consistently when professionals were asked to come up with a rapid-fire choice of moves, but not as much for the amateurs. "These results suggest that the precuneus-caudate circuit implements the automatic, yet complicated, processes of board-pattern perception and next-move generation in board game experts," the researchers reported.

Does this mean good gamers are born, not made? And do these results apply only to shogi players? In an e-mail interview, I asked one of the leaders of the research team, Keiji Tanaka, to discuss the findings in greater depth. Here's an edited Q&A:

JNTO

Shogi is a chesslike board game that is commonly played in Japan.

Cosmic Log: Last year, I wrote about research from a team led by the University of Pittsburgh's Kirk Erickson that indicated a correlation between skill in playing an arcade-type video game and the relative volume of the caudate nucleus and putamen. This study seems to confirm the idea that structure of the caudate nucleus plays a role in game-playing proficiency … would you agree?

Keiji Tanaka: Firstly, we measured the volume of caudate nucleus and compared the measure between professional and amateur players. There was no difference. Secondly, the game of Erickson et al. is largely sensory-motor, whereas board games are purely cognitive. There is thus little commonality between the two "games," although they are both called games. Thirdly, the learning examined in Erickson et al. took place within 24 hours. In our case, even the amateur players have spent many years learning the play, although their training is less extensive than that of professional players. The extent of learning is many orders different between our case and Erickson et al. Therefore, our results are not at all related to those of Erickson et al.

Q: You and your colleagues suggest that expert players take advantage of neural connections between the precuneus and the caudate nucleus to recognize a game pattern quickly and intuitively arrive at a "next best move." Did you see evidence of a temporal progression, or was the experiment not designed to chart the flow of neural impulses in that way? Did you arrive at this hypothesis merely by considering the roles traditionally assigned to those areas of the brain

A: There was significantly stronger positive correlation between precuneus activations and caudate activations during the quick-generation task in professional players, compared with correlations during other tasks in professional players, and compared with correlations during the quick generation task in amateur players. This is the evidence from our own experiments.

Our results do not indicate the direction of signal flow (from the precuneus to the caudate or opposite).  The previous anatomical studies (in monkeys) showed that there are direct projections from the precuneus to the part of the caudate nucleus. Also, it has been shown that the precuneus has projections from the visual cortical areas in the occipital cortex, but the caudate nucleus does not have projections from the visual cortical areas. Based on these previous findings, we suggest that the signal flows from the precuneus to the caudate.

Q: What further experiments are you planning to follow up on the suggestions raised in this paper?

A: We are conducting a few follow-up experiments, but we would like to introduce them after we get results.

Q: Are there implications for neuroscience beyond game-playing? For example, will learning about this particular process with Shogi shed light on the way in which experts in other fields (business, for example) make seemingly instinctual snap decisions about successful strategies in other scenarios?

A: We assume that the same circuit (precuneus to caudate) is essential for other types of cognitive expertise — for example, chess, MRI reading by radiologists, solving troubles in computer networks, and auditing. However, we have no direct evidence. The research was supported by Fujitsu, which is one of the biggest computer companies in Japan. They want to get hints from our study about the best ways to educate system engineers who solve the troubles in computer networks. The engineers largely depend on intuition.

Q: Are expert shogi-players born or made? Do your results suggest that proficiency at determining the "next best move" is an innate faculty, hard-wired into the brains of experts? Or could it be that experts have strengthened the neural connections for instinctive play through practice? Some of your results point to a correlation between caudate activity in amateurs and the speed with which they select the best move, which might suggest that some brains are naturally built to play shogi better. What’s your view on this "nature vs. nurture" aspect of game-playing proficiency?

A: Our results do not give a direct answer to the nature-vs.-nurture question. However, previous psychological studies have shown that the expertise is specific to the domain. Chess players are super only in chess, MRI-reading experts are super only in MRI reading, and so on. Also, the psychological studies have shown that the development of expertise requires a long period of training, more than 10 years. These characteristics — domain specificity and the long period of learning that's required — are more consistent with the nurture idea: Expertise is the result of long, serious training.

If that's not food for thought, I don't know what is. Feel free to cogitate over this research and add your comments below.

More on brains and games:

• Interactive: A road map for your brain
• How playing games change your brain
• Games ease trauma — but not just any game
• Brain games don't make you smarter, study says

In addition to Tanaka, authors of "The Neural Basis of Intuitive Best Next-Move Generation in Board Game Experts" include Xiaohong Wan, Hironori Nakatani, Kenichi Ueno, Takeshi Asamizuya and Kang Cheng. The work was supported by Fujitsu Laboratories and a grant-in-aid from Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. The Japan Shogi Association participated in the study.

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). Boyle has also written a book about Pluto as well as the past and present search for planets. To learn more, click your way to the website for "The Case for Pluto."