Obama's $100 million BRAIN project, which has been promoted as essential to unlocking the secrets behind degenerative brain conditions and kick starting job growth, has been temporarily sidelined due to the government shutdown.
However, a much larger European Union
project has now officially commenced. The Human Brain Project is slated for well north of 1 billion dollars in funding as it gathers steam until its projected testing date of 2016.
It is important to note that the Brain Waves project was a mission of UK's elite think tank The Royal Society launched in 2010 to set up the philosophical, legal and intellectual research behind the move to map the human brain.
Combined with black budget military
funding, there seems to be no shortage of money for this "final
frontier" despite what might be happening on the surface in
America.
According to neuroscientist Henry Markram, this will be an epic undertaking that will require a vast increase upwards of 100,000 times more computing power than what is currently available.
Here is the HBP Vision statement:
One could easily conclude that whatever discoveries are found (or they believe they have found - especially in terms of "disorders") will result in global collaborative efforts to identify and treat the new catalog of supposed brain anomalies.
It will be an attempt to "redefine disease" under the
banner of Medical Informatics - the fusion of medicine and computer
science. It admittedly will employ the use of public information
databases and new algorithms for data collection and management
(min. 18:20).
It's what Sten Grillner, a neurophysiology professor from Stockholm, says is the mission to create a "Google brain."
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