DailyDirt: Where In The Brain?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The US government has announced it's going to fund a massive amount of brain research. The brain has been studied for a long time, but there have been some false starts such as phrenology. With modern science and technology, we might be able to understand a bit more about how brains work. Here are just a few tidbits on our gray matter.

• The Brain Activity Map project could cost billions of dollars, and lots of people are looking back at the Human Genome Project as an example for how government funded science can work. Assigning accurate economic benefits from scientific projects can be debated, but funding science is usually a good investment... [url]
• Data from 182 Vietnam vets with brain injuries have helped to map intelligence in the brain. A significant amount of brain mapping has come from studying injured or abnormal brains, but hopefully, newer imaging techniques will allow researchers to look at normally-functioning brains to better understand how people actually think. [url]
• There are a bunch of TED talks about the brain. The human brain is incredibly complex, so there's a lot that can be said about it, but there's even more that we don't know yet. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: brain, brain activity map project, neuroscience, research, science, tedtalks