On Tuesday, President Obama unveiled a decades-long project designed to map the working of the human brain. “There is this enormous mystery waiting to be unlocked,” President Obama said during his briefing at the White House.
Do you wonder why you dream certain dreams, how your memories are stored, where your emotions come from? “There is still tremendous mysterious about the brain despite how much we know about it,” Cycle host Toure pointed out. This new project will hopefully help solve some of those answers along with developing new technologies that record the activities of individual cells and neurons in our brains. All of this could lead to treatments for Alzheimer’s, epilepsy, autism, traumatic brain injuries, along with other diseases.
“If we keep taking bold steps,” President Obama said, “I’m confident America will continue to lead the world into that next frontier of human understanding.”
The “BRAIN initiative” which stands for “Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies” will look into the way people think, learn, and remember. The initial cost of the project is $100 million--a sum that the budget-conscious Congress must approve. While it is a lot of money, “it is not, in the grand scheme of the federal budget, it is not a massive spend.,” Cycle host Krystal Ball said. “But I do think it is something that Americans can get excited about, can sort of feel pride about. Can follow and feel like we’re getting back to those days where we’re really leading in terms of what we’re doing from a science perspective.”