The picture, from the Washington University – University of Minnesota Human Connectome Project consortium, did not come with any explanation and I worry about how scientific such an image really is. One hopes that it is more than a figment of the imagination of a researcher and a fancy computer, loosely linked to someone's brain - or perhaps the brains of lots of people, averaged out in some cunningly statistical way. That in training the computer to produce such a picture one is not capturing more of the observer than of the ostensible subject. One has the same sort of worries about the stories of anthropologists and those pictures of the universe that you get from fancy telescopes.
The picture came to me from President Obama's brain initiative, which can be found at https://www.whitehouse.gov/share/brain-initiative. An initiative which is not immune from numerological, not to say magical influence, coming with seven goals (of scientific flavour) and seven themes (of management flavour). Seven being a very important number, a number which has cropped up in all sorts of contexts for thousands of years. That apart, one of the themes is ethics and I hope that this theme does its stuff, with the ethics of some of this work seeming to me to be rather tricky (see, for example, reference 2). Although, thinking once again as I type, maybe the sort of thing this project is likely to bring is no worse from an ethics point of view than the crude surgical interventions of yesterday or the crude chemical interventions of today. I think here of the lobotomies starting in the thirties of the last century. Worse because modern methods have it in them to hit millions of people rather than thousands of them?
For those who back Europe, we have the EC human brain project, which can be found at https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/. A project which looks to be very much of the same sort as the President's, albeit without getting into sevens. A project about which I think I have read adverse comment in the press, comment about aiming too high.
The modus operandi of both projects looks to be funding worthy sub-projects, although, as is the way with noisy government initiatives, you cannot always be sure that it is new money. They might, in some large part, be simply rebadging existing grants and allocations.
PS: lobotomies were deemed to be inhuman and banned in the former Soviet Union in 1950, some decades before we got around to banning them here in the west. The ways of the world are indeed curious.
Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/rats.html.
Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/solaris-iv.html.
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