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Tom Insel's Brain Awareness Week Blog cites HCP as advance in brain science
In a post in honor of Brain Awareness Week, Tom Insel, M.D., Director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) raised the Human Connectome Project as one of this year’s major advances in brain science:
This year, this is a good time to note a few recent advances. In a few months, the Human Connectome Project will complete its multimodal study of 1,200 healthy adults, including 300 twin pairs. Already, data on over 500 subjects have been made public, creating an unprecedented treasure trove for students who want to explore individual variation in brain pathways. Like the Human Genome Project that created a fundamental map of our genetic sequence, the Human Connectome Project will provide a reference atlas of macro-level brain connections that can be used to study development, diseases, and species differences. Developmental connectomes and disease connectome projects will follow soon.
Insel mentions the surprising rise of interest and investment in brain mapping, both in the U.S., with the President’s BRAIN Initiative, and in other major efforts worldwide. The first 58 projects funded by the BRAIN Initiative have now begun and plans for funding new research and clinical tools through the BRAIN Initiative are unfolding.
The detailed information HCP is producing on connections and variability in the healthy human brain is providing a baseline set of knowledge on which applied projects in the BRAIN Initiative may develop tools for defining and ultimately treating mental disorders in patients.