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[[http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.08/brain.html?pg=1&topic=&topic_set=|Wired]]

The Human Brain Project is combining wet anatomy with next-gen scanning, imaging, and networking to give neuroscience a revolutionary new tool - the globally accessible online mind.

By Jennifer Kahn


- 1p -
The lobby of UCLA'S Brain Mapping Center is a lofty place, an airy, two-story atrium with a polished concrete floor and a narrow balcony that circles the room like an observation deck. It's a quiet, almost meditative space that in the bright Los Angeles sunlight seems as normal as a library. Only farther in do things get weird.




Walk through an unmarked door and a short hallway leads south, past walls crammed with pictures of human brains. A few of them - scanned, digitized, colored, and sliced - have bright lines drawn through their centers that look like bundles of insulated wire. Others, whose blue depths swirl with red and green, resemble shriveled Christmas ornaments. One, seen through the cutaway skull of a live surgical patient, has been affixed with dozens of tiny, numbered squares - troop deployments on a Pentagon war map.





The images end at a room filled wall-to-wall by a giant white cube. A 2-foot-hole bores through the center of the cube. A man's legs stick out of the hole.





Next door, in the control room, a researcher leans into a microphone. "Ready?" she asks the man. "Follow the hands." Inside the cube, wearing a $40,000 pair of virtual reality goggles, Brian (not his real name) sees a pair of videotaped hands lift and move their index fingers; he copies the movements. As he does, a wavy-patterned lilac oval appears on the control-room computer screen. It's a picture of Brian's brain - specifically, one of 92 cross sections recorded along each of three axes by the cube, a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner.





The cross section - a thin, 3-D slice - is the starting point of a project that aims to radically change the way we understand the brain. Where MRI technology spins water molecules to get high-resolution pictures of soft tissue, fMRI scans - which can be done with the same $3 million machine - record moment-by-moment variations in blood-oxygen levels, which in turn reflect neural activity. Each computer-generated slice contains a hundred thousand voxels, or 3-D pixels. Combine the information in all the voxels and slices and you get a complete picture of the brain in action. Your brain - live, on screen.





With the genome cracked and the universe mapped to its distant reaches, the brain has become one of science's final frontiers: humankind's own black box. We may know how stars burn and black holes collapse, but we still know only scraps about our own heads: why we can remember 10 phone numbers and not a hundred, or why we can recognize faces effortlessly but computers can't. Back in the 1500s, the famous Flemish anatomist Vesalius first guessed that the important parts of the brain weren't the fluid-filled pockets near its core - previously believed to house essential "animal spirits" - but the fleshy folds and wrinkles all around. (Of course, he missed a few calls, too: He asserted that our brains were awash in "fulginous excrement" that needed to be purged.) Since then, we've picked apart countless cortices - and even diced Einstein's brain in search of clues - but have found only tantalizing hints as to why some people are geniuses and the rest of us are not.






"We're like Martians looking at a car," says UCLA neuroscientist John Mazziotta, the 52-year-old director of the Brain Mapping Center. "We've driven the car, and we've taken the car apart, but we don't know how one part is related to the other." All we know is that somewhere in the homogeneous folds of our cortex, tiny aberrations drag us from normalcy into schizophrenia. Or, in rarer cases, endow us with seemingly superhuman powers: the ability to factor huge numbers, memorize a telephone book, or perceive smell as vividly as a dog does.





The past three decades of poking and prodding brought only the realization that the brain was even more complex than we'd originally suspected: 10 billion neurons and 60 trillion synapses communicating through an elaborate system of electrical and chemical signals. Worse, by the 1980s, a number of studies implied that each of our brains might have unique circuitry, with memory and language wired differently from person to person. If that were the case, comparing brains would be like trying to compare anthills, each with different tunnels and streams of information. It was possible, scientists agreed, that understanding the brain could involve mapping not a single, incredibly complex world, but mapping several billion different worlds, many of whose landmarks had yet to be found.






It was a little embarrassing. Stumped by our own brains! But during the past few years, the trackless wilderness has started yielding to advances in neurotechnology. With the help of MRIs, positron emission tomography scanners, and optical and electromagnetic signal imagers, researchers have been able to view brains down to their synapses. More important, they've peered inside the brain as it functions. With fMRI scans, introduced in 1991 by researcher Jack Belliveau and his colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital, neurologists have begun to tease out the connections between different parts of the organ: how we remember, make associations, concentrate. Meanwhile, transcranial magnetic stimulators have enabled doctors to zap areas of the brain with magnetic pulses sent through the skull - causing zappees to see flickering lights or experience twitches. Stimulating a spot on the left or right frontal lobe has more recently been tried as a treatment for depression, with some success.