Brain scientists are on a roll. Concern about rising levels of mental distress have resulted in unprecedented levels of funding in the US and Europe. And a range of new technologies, from genetics to brain imaging, are offering extraordinary insights into the molecular and cellular processes underlying how we see, how we remember, why we become emotional.
Scientists who have spent the last decade charting the human brain have quietly debuted the fruit of their labors: a mammoth digital atlas that maps in multiple dimensions thousands of examples of the most complex of organs.
Using magnetic resonance imaging machines that detect the ebb and flow of brain activity, researchers have become so good at peering into the workings of the human mind that their work is raising a new and deeply personal ethical concern: brain privacy.
Adding a model of brain circuits to a computer model of a singing bird has allowed scientists to figure out how birds compose their songs. The feat hints that we might one day be able to map some of the complex circuitry in an animal's brain just by listening to its calls -- or map a human's brain using a computer model tuned to "talk" human-like gibberish.
Scientists are finally beginning to understand how common genetic differences among individuals underlie differences in the structures that make up their brains.
Researchers around the world are pursuing the same goals of gaining a better understanding of how the mind works and then using that knowledge to build implant systems that would make brain control of computers and other machines possible.
British and German scientists believe they have identified a specific area of the human brain which appears to be responsible for intelligence.
Ray Kurzweil argues within 35 years, the line between man and machine will blur, as atom-sized 'nanobots' map the human brain from the inside out.