Scanning healthy brains to understand and enhance our minds

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myelinbrainThe Brain, in Exquis­ite Detail (The New York Times):

  • “Each of the 1,200 sub­jects whose brain data will form the final data­base will spend a good 10 hours over two days being scanned and doing oth­er tests. The sci­en­tists and tech­ni­cians will then spend at least anoth­er 10 hours ana­lyz­ing and stor­ing each person’s data to build some­thing that neu­ro­science does not yet have: a base­line data­base for struc­ture and activ­i­ty in a healthy brain that can be cross-ref­er­enced with per­son­al­i­ty traits, cog­ni­tive skills and genet­ics. And it will be online, in an inter­ac­tive map avail­able to all…The data­base and brain map are a part of the Human Con­nec­tome Project, a rough­ly $40 mil­lion five-year effort sup­port­ed by the Nation­al Insti­tutes of Health…She said the cen­tral ques­tion the data might help answer was, “How do dif­fer­ences between you and me, and how our brains are wired up, relate to dif­fer­ences in our behav­iors, our thoughts, our emo­tions, our feel­ings, our experiences?”

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