Obama Brain Study: A New Roadmap Of The Brain Can Potentially Lead To Breakthroughs In Alzheimer's And Parkinson's Disease

The Obama administration is planning to unveil a decade-long study of the human brain and build a comprehensive map of the brain's activity as early as next month. This ambitious project, called the Brain Activity Map (BAM), is hoping to do for the brain what the Human Genome Project did for genetics.

The multi-million dollar project will include federal agencies, private foundations and teams of neuroscientists and nanoscientists that will work toward advancing the knowledge of the brain's neurons and offer more insight into perception, actions and, ultimately, consciousness.  Scientists are also hoping that the resulrs from the project will help to develop new breakthroughs in understanding diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and find new therapies for different mental illnesses.

President Obama mentioned his plan to map out the human brain during his State of the Union address last week stating, "Every dollar we invested to map the human genome returned $140 to our economy -- every dollar," he said in regard to Human Genome Project, a groundbreaking international effort to map human DNA launched in the 1990s by President George H.W. Bush. "Today our scientists are mapping the human brain to unlock the answers to Alzheimer's. They're developing drugs to regenerate damaged organs, devising new materials to make batteries 10 times more powerful. Now is not the time to gut these job-creating investments in science and innovation."

Harvard geneticist George Church first proposed a plan to illustrate the brain's architecture back in June 2012 when he talked about how expensive it would be in Neuron Journal. "We can bring down the cost and increase the quality of the technology," Church said to NBC News. "We are trying to work with current funding [levels] to bring down the cost." The US government's plan would cost $3 billion which would be directed toward global neuroscience research. It's goal is to lower the cost of existing technologies and create new techniques that allow us to get a better look into the brain at a molecular level.