Hunting for the Brain's Hidden Treasures

Beautifully done!

Re. "A true map of the brain would reveal how information flows..." - superb point, but all we have are some traces of electrical signal flows through interconnected networks of neurons. There certainly seems to be some extensive control mechanism (software) that determines how signals flow among which available connections. We have no idea what information is represented by those signal flows, how it's stored and recalled, and how it influences our actions - just for starters.

We cannot comprehend what our computers are doing from a map of circuit interconnections or even a trace of electrical signal flows within the circuits. We cannot determine precisely what our computers are doing even with list of all the programs that are loaded and copies of their instruction source codes. With a list of all the programs and data loaded into storage we might have a chance, given enough computers and time to perform the necessary analyses. Even then, the feasibility of such an undertaking could rival the sequencing of the genome, just to find that I'm just entering this comment into your comment entry box...

There's an enormous amount of critical information about the brain that we're not even aware of yet - information that having an enormously costly, highly detailed map of brain physiology will not even suggest to us...

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Source: http://rss.sciam.com/~r/sciam/biology/~3/LDFMC9dCasE/article.cfm

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