TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

The Obama administration is apparently planning to “map the active human brain.” Details about specific plans are, well, there are none, but Gary Marcus (second link of the day!) has specific ideas for what they should do:

Rather than putting a huge amount of money into a single project, as the Europeans have, and as the Obama Administration apparently intends, we should endow five separate projects, at a billion dollars each, addressing five of the most fundamental unsolved questions in neuroscience. One project, for example, should focus on deciphering the basic language of the brain. What is the basic element of neural computation? What is the basic scheme by which symbolic information (like sentences) are stored? A second should focus on understanding the rules governing how neurons organize into circuits; a third on neural plasticity and neural development, and understanding how the brain communicates information from one region to another, and determines which circuits to use in a given situation; a fourth on the relation between brain circuits, genes, and behavior; a fifth on developing new techniques for analyzing and observing brain function.

All good proposals. Mapping out brain activity, unless it’s at the neuron level, is not particularly interesting. But understanding how neurons organize themselves absolutely would be.