As it happens, there’s another paper, just out in Science, that also makes the case for the human brain’s universality, if a bit indirectly. But, in these contentious times, they are also handy. I hasten to add - emphatically - that I’m not for a moment arguing that these things are untrue. I have wondered the same thing about the hypothesis, well supported by data, that Homo sap came into being just once, in Africa. I can’t help wondering if that emphasis on similarities rather than differences isn’t in part political, stressing as it does the biological oneness of the human species. So at this stage, Jones said, the fact that the brains are the same sex doesn’t matter much because the researchers are most interested in how alike the brains are, not their differences. On average, there was 94% similarity in gene expression between the two brains. (That’s presumably the reason the hed on this piece reads “Take My Husband’s Brain - Please!”) (A woman’s brain is, however, to be part of the study’s next phase.) When Hopson asked Jones why no women, he told her one reason is that husbands apparently don’t want to donate a wife’s brain to science. You essentially build a brain observatory where you try to study one behavior exhaustively across the brain, and you make the data available to other people.Īt the Wall Street Journal’s Health Blog, Katherine Hobson zeroes in on a fact that other discussions didn’t emphasize: the Atlas’s human brain data come from only two human brains, and both of them belonged to men. Koch’s view of the Institute’s next act differs somewhat from Jones’s he told Callaway last month: The idea is to focus on one or two behaviors - how we see, for instance, or smell, or remember - and ask how the relevant information is encoded, represented and transformed to give rise to behavior … the time is right to bring all these resources to bear onto a single question, not 20 questions in 10 different animals, each behaving differently. Koch’s field is the neuroscience of consciousness, and he is noteworthy in part because he collaborated with Francis Crick, of DNA fame, who moved into that field for his last act. At the Great Beyond, Ewen Callaway describes it too, noting that last month the Institute hired Cal Tech’s Christof Koch as chief scientific officer. Emily Singer describes the project, quotes from the press release, and accompanies her post with arresting graphics from the Institute. For its next trick, he says, the Institute is tackling the wiring of the mouse brain.Īt Technology Review. (The Institute released its mouse brain atlas in 2006.) Jones expects the earliest impacts to come in two fields: genetics and drug development. And lest we get too swelled-headed about this statistic, it’s about the same as in the mouse. The most intriguing datum is this one: more than 82% of human genes are expressed in the brain. The post also includes a brief Q&A with Allan Jones, the Institute’s CEO, who describes how the data (and brain samples) were collected. Jonah Lehrer at Frontal Cortex excerpts a piece on the Atlas he did for Wired in 2009.
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