Raw data!<p><a href="http://www.humanconnectomeproject.org/2012/01/first-public-release-of-3t-connectom-scanner-data/" rel="nofollow">http://www.humanconnectomeproject.org/2012/01/first-public-r...</a>
"Only 50 such scans have ever been done."<p>"The aim the $40m programme is to map the entire human neural wiring system by scanning the brains of 1,200 Americans."
Awesome, this kind of things really amaze me. I'm just curious what are the possibilities once they have everything scanned. Yes we can probably cure some disease or fix some stuff, but that's kind of old news, I am more interested in what they can actually do. Can they upload new language into your brain? or what else?
This TED video is a good explanation of the concept of a "connectome" for the layman:
<a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/sebastian_seung.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.ted.com/talks/sebastian_seung.html</a><p>The simple connectome of c. elegans has been mapped, and there is an open source project to use this dataset and other data to run a full simulation of the worm in a virtual environment:
<a href="http://openworm.org" rel="nofollow">http://openworm.org</a>
Can't imagine what those few thick rendered wires represent in a brain. Do they stand for signals by strength? Why can't we see how they terminate? Why are the bundles seemingly unconnected with one another?<p>I didn't get any insight from that graphic. For $40M I hope they have some better results than that.