Last week the New York Times revealed that the Obama Administration may soon seek billions of dollars from Congress for a Brain Activity Map (BAM) project. The full details of the project are not known and will probably remain unknown until the official announcement, perhaps in March, but some factlets and hints are emerging.

The rumors on the Brain Activity Map project follow by a few weeks the announcement that, in Europe, the Human Brain Project (HBP) has been chosen by the European Commission as one of its massively funded top science projects.

Switzerland will develop a CERN for the brain, with a new research campus called Neuropolis for in-silico life science, and centered around the HBP.

The goal of the HBP is to pull together all our existing knowledge about the human brain and to reconstruct the brain, piece by piece, in supercomputer-based models and simulations. The HBP offers the prospect of a new understanding of the human brain, and of completely new computing and robotic technologies.


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