The Human Cognome Project seeks to reverse-engineer the human brain, parallelling in many ways the Human Genome Project and its success in deciphering the human genome. Picture of a human brain generated from MRI data Sagittal slice from a fMRI scan of a human brain. ... The Human Genome Project (HGP) endeavored to map the human genome down to the nucleotide (or base pair) level and to identify all the genes present in it. ... Human genome is the genome of Homo sapiens. ...

Analytical techniques used in the Human Cognome Project include:

• studying brain biology and chemistry in wet lab experiments,
• studying brain structure using frozen tissue sample scanning and imaging,
• studying brain activity and function using active brain imaging,
  (which is improving both spatial and temporal resolutions in successive technology generations)
• studying brain development though the field of morphogenesis.
• studying brain disease, injury and dysfunction through the fields of brain pathology, neurology and psychopharmacology, and
• studying psychology relative to brain structure and function through neuropsychology

The National Science Foundation (NSF) and other scientific research bodies have endorsed the Human Cognome Project. Brain imaging is a fairly recent discipline within medicine and neuroscience. ... Morphogenesis (from the Greek morphê shape and genesis creation) is one of three fundamental aspects of developmental biology along with the control of cell growth and cellular differentiation. ... Pathology (in ancient Greek pathos = feeling, pain, suffering and logos = discourse or treatise, i. ... Neurology is the branch of medicine dealing with the nervous system and its disorders. ... Psychopharmacology is the study of the effects of any psychoactive drug that acts upon the mind by affecting brain chemistry. ... Neuropsychology is a branch of psychology that aims to understand how the structure and function of the brain relates to specific psychological processes. ... The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent United States government agency responsible for supporting basic science research mainly by providing research funding. ...

Fundamental brain research as the primary enabler for creating smarter-than-human artificial intelligence is endorsed by many public figures, most notably entrepreneurs Ray Kurzweil, Jeff Hawkins and Paul Allen, and scientist Stephen Hawking. Artificial intelligence (also known as machine intelligence and often abbreviated as AI) is intelligence exhibited by any manufactured (i. ... Dr. Raymond Kurzweil (born February 12, 1948) is a pioneer in the fields of optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic musical keyboards. ... Jeff Hawkins (born June 1, 1957 in Long Island, New York) is the founder of Palm Computing (where he invented the PalmPilot) and Handspring (where he invented the Treo). ... Paul Allen Paul G. Allen (born January 21, 1953) is an entrepreneur who first established himself by co-founding Microsoft Corporation with Bill Gates. ... Stephen William Hawking, CH, CBE, FRS (born January 8, 1942) is one of the worlds leading theoretical physicists. ...

External links

• Robert Horn's Page at Stanford University: http://www.stanford.edu/~rhorn/a/topic/cognom/tocCncptlzHumnCognome.html

• Redwood Neuroscience Institute: http://www.rni.org/
• Allen Brain Atlas: http://www.brainatlas.org/

• Yahoo! News Brain Research: http://news.yahoo.com/fc?in=Science&cat=Brain_Research

• http://www.technology.gov/reports/2002/NBIC/Part1.pdf
• http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/jan04/0104bio1.html
• Brain News on NanoAging