US Joins Google, Microsoft In "Brain Race"

Nerval's Lobster writes "Decades after the space race pitted the United States against Russia, a new race has emerged: the race to map the human brain. The New York Times reported Feb. 18 that the Obama administration is gearing up to announce the Brain Activity Map project, an effort to map an active human brain that could give new insight into how neurons interact with each other, providing new avenues of research for diseases such as Alzheimer's. The U.S. will apparently pit itself against a collection of European research agencies that have announced similar projects. The U.S. effort, however, will apparently involve U.S. businesses, which would naturally benefit from the high-profile nature of the effort; in theory, the latter could also apply the resulting discoveries to their own computing efforts. The Times reported that representatives from Google, Microsoft, and Qualcomm met with government representatives at the California Institute of Technology to try and figure out whether or not there are sufficient computing resources to process the vast amounts of data that the experiments are expected to produce, or whether new ones would need to be built."

Envy

[Anonymous Coward]

This is just a poor copy of the European Union project to model the brain. This is an investment of a milliard euros over some years that has the goal to understand the human brain by building a working simulation of equivalent size in information and complexity terms.

Re:Disease

[javilon]

I am not really sure this is about Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. I think this is about the run up to the singularity. There are many riches and power to be gained by the first country or entity able to reverse engineer the human brain. Now it looks feasible and nobody wants to be out of it.

If it were about health, they would invest the same amount of resources into a cure for circulatory diseases.

10 million times more data than DNA

[peter303]

There are 13 billion bits of information in a human DNA sequence. A brain has a trillion cells of several dozen types that may touch 10,000 other cells. You are talking about a 100 quadrillion edge graph there.