Time magazine provides a nifty overview of some of the "neuroeconomics" issues that have been floating around the popular press. See here. It also adds this tidbit on the International Consortium for Brain Mapping and its future potential:
What's creating the most excitement is a project called the International Consortium for Brain Mapping, a 12-year collaborative effort to create an atlas of the human brain, based on scans of 7,000 brains from three continents. Coordinated by John Mazziotta, who runs the Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center at UCLA, the brain atlas is due to be released online next year. Data are being stored and analyzed on a supercomputer at UCLA with 1 petabyte of capacity--equivalent to a book with 250 billion pages. "They are laying the groundwork for all other brain studies to come," says Allan Jones, of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle.
The immediate benefit would be at the clinical level. The atlas would give researchers and physicians around the world access to virtual maps of how the brain functions, to compare with data they obtain from scans of their subjects or patients. By the end of next year, they should be able to project local scans free of charge into the online atlas via a computer technique called "warping." That will immediately show if some part of the brain appears to be working abnormally, compared with norms established by the scans of the 7,000 "healthy" brains. "We can do very tight matches. For example, you could look for all left-handed Chinese women in their 20s with two years of college and make a match," says Mazziotta. The atlas' scanning techniques could also be used to speed drug trials, since researchers could compare images of the brain before, during and after the administration of a new medication--and then compare those images with brains in the atlas.
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