Brain Activity Map Project

This multi-billion dollar 10 year study, mapping the human brain, hopes to do for brain research what the 13 year Human Genome Project has done for genetics. Coordinating research efforts and results might lead to breakthroughs in diagnosis and treatment of neurological and psychiatric diseases like Alzheimer’s, addiction, and autism. Mental illness, a broad general term for a number of seemingly sometimes related and sometimes completely unrelated diseases might be better defined by the outcomes and findings of this project and too perhaps the link between gun violence and mental illness that has seemed to plague this country as of late. The impact of the Brain Activity Map project could be a significant plus for how we help our aging boomer population stay intellectually viable, and for how we educate our young people, whose neural pathways are affected by changing, yet ever more invasive technology.

I think about my husband’s Dad who was born in 1905 (and lived to the age of 98) and how overwhelming the whirlwind of changes in his lifetime must have seemed to him. He was born at the very beginning of the age automobiles and was not among the privileged that owned them. He flew in a plane for the first time when he was well into his 90s and was so impressed by it (and the stewardesses who gave him his plastic wings pin) that he said he was sorry he hadn't done it earlier, all the places he would have seen. I was born almost 50 years later, before cell phones, the internet, microwave ovens, and our first tiny black and white television. I have a hard time imagining what the world of the future will be like if I live so long. But I’d like to think the future could benefit from the knowledge gained by discoveries in one of the last, long uncharted frontiers, the human brain, using and coordinating today’s and newer, even better, improved technologies with the Brain Activity Map project.