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The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World's Leading Neuroscientists

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The world's top experts take readers to the very frontiers of brain science
Includes a chapter by 2014 Nobel laureates May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser


An unprecedented look at the quest to unravel the mysteries of the human brain, The Future of the Brain takes readers to the absolute frontiers of science. Original essays by leading researchers such as Christof Koch, George Church, Olaf Sporns, and May-Britt and Edvard Moser describe the spectacular technological advances that will enable us to map the more than eighty-five billion neurons in the brain, as well as the challenges that lie ahead in understanding the anticipated deluge of data and the prospects for building working simulations of the human brain. A must-read for anyone trying to understand ambitious new research programs such as the Obama administration's BRAIN Initiative and the European Union's Human Brain Project, The Future of the Brain sheds light on the breathtaking implications of brain science for medicine, psychiatry, and even human consciousness itself.

Contributors include: Misha Ahrens, Ned Block, Matteo Carandini, George Church, John Donoghue, Chris Eliasmith, Simon Fisher, Mike Hawrylycz, Sean Hill, Christof Koch, Leah Krubitzer, Michel Maharbiz, Kevin Mitchell, Edvard Moser, May-Britt Moser, David Poeppel, Krishna Shenoy, Olaf Sporns, Anthony Zador.

ISBN-13: 9780691258829

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Publication Date: 04-30-2024

Pages: 304

Series: Princeton Science Library - #146

Gary Marcus is professor emeritus of psychology and neural science at New York University. His books include Guitar Zero: The Science of Becoming Musical at Any Age and Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind. Jeremy Freeman is a neuroscientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Farm Research Campus. Mackenzie W. Mathis is the Bertarelli Foundation Chair of Integrative Neuroscience and an assistant professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"A wonderful way to launch yourself into the exciting world of twenty-first-century neuroscience, whether you are a scientist or an intellectually curious layperson. The power in this sampler is that the coverage is not just technical but conceptual: the essays probe the ways in which an understanding of the brain will and won't illuminate the mind, and they do so with depth and balance rather than the usual breathless hype."—Steven Pinker, author of The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works

"Have you ever wondered what's coming around the bend in terms of new insights into how the brain works? Open the pages of The Future of the Brain to find out. Gary Marcus and Jeremy Freeman have brought together some of the leading thinkers and researchers to share their vision of where we are headed. It's a fun, readable book full of insights."—Joseph LeDoux, author of The Emotional Brain and Synaptic Self

"A deep, intriguing view into the most exciting advances in neuroscience. The Future of the Brain is a nuanced and thought-provoking guide to what we do and don't know about the human brain—and what we may or may not one day find out."—Maria Konnikova, author of Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

"Understanding, theorizing, and simulating the human brain are essential goals for twenty-first-century science and engineering. Surfing the fine line between science and science fiction, this book is a treasure trove of daring ideas."—Stanislas Dehaene, author of Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts

"The brain is a complicated thing, and progress in understanding how it works may seem slow. Will creating huge research teams, collecting more data at higher resolutions, and sharing data more widely and openly kick-start a new wave of progress? Or does the field still need to make conceptual leaps before the results would even make sense? Brilliant minds on both sides describe their visions of the future of neuroscience in this collection of short, engaging essays."—Christopher Chabris, coauthor of The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us

"Massive technological advances promise rapid and profound discoveries in neuroscience, with very broad implications for our understanding of behavior, ethics, and even religion. Featuring contributions by acknowledged experts, this collection provides a fascinating look at what is happening in the ‘big science' of the brain."—Michael C. Corballis, author of The Recursive Mind: The Origins of Human Language, Thought, and Civilization

Table of Contents

List of Contributors ix

Preface Gary Marcus and Jeremy Freeman xi

MAPPING THE BRAIN

Building Atlases of the Brain 3

Mike Hawrylycz with Chinh Dang, Christof Koch, and Hongkui Zeng

Whole Brain Neuroimaging and Virtual Reality 17

Misha B. Ahrens

Project MindScope 25

Christof Koch with Clay Reid, Hongkui Zeng, Stefan Mihalas, Mike Hawrylycz, John Philips, Chinh Dang, and Allan Jones

The Connectome as a DNA Sequencing Problem 40

Anthony Zador

Rosetta Brain 50

George Church with Adam Marblestone and Reza Kalhor

COMPUTATION

Understanding the Cortex through Grid Cells 67

May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser

Recording from Many Neurons Simultaneously: From Measurement to Meaning 78

Krishna V. Shenoy

Network Neuroscience 90

Olaf Sporns

Large-Scale Neuroscience: From Analytics to Insight 100

Jeremy Freeman

SIMULATING THE BRAIN

Whole Brain Simulation 111

Sean Hill

Building a Behaving Brain 125

Chris Eliasmith

LANGUAGE

The Neurobiology of Language 139

David Poeppel

Translating the Genome in Human Neuroscience 149

Simon E. Fisher

Color plates follow p. 160

SKEPTICS

Consciousness, Big Science, and Conceptual Clarity 161

Ned Block

From Circuits to Behavior: A Bridge Too Far? 177

Matteo Carandini

Lessons from Evolution 186

Leah Krubitzer

Lessons from the Genome 194

Arthur Caplan with Nathan Kunzler

The Computational Brain 205

Gary Marcus

IMPLICATIONS

Neurotechnology 219

John Donoghue

The Miswired Brain, Genes, and Mental Illness 234

Kevin J. Mitchell

Neural Dust: An Untethered Approach to Chronic Brain-Machine Interfaces 243

Michel M. Maharbiz with Dongjin Seo, Jose M. Carmena, Jan M. Rabaey, and Elad Alon

AFTERWORD

Neuroscience in 2064: A Look at the Last Century 255

Christof Koch and Gary Marcus

Glossary 271

Index 275