Pallab Ghosh By Pallab Ghosh Science correspondent, BBC News
Scientists say they have published the most detailed brain scans "the world has
ever seen" as part of a project to understand how the organ works.
The aim of the project is to determine how a person's brain structure
influences their talents and behaviour.
Researchers involved in the so called Human Connectome Project have published
the scans of 68 adults in the study.
They eventually hope to scan 1,200 people and also collect details of their
behavioural traits and DNA.
The information is made freely available to neuroscientists in their quest to
unlock the secrets of the human brain.
The project leader, Prof David Van Essen of Washington University in St Louis,
told BBC News that sharing the data with the international community of
researchers would spur rapid advances in brain science.
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We hope to uncover how interactions between different regions of the brain
might control people's behaviour
Dr Tim Behrens Oxford University
"We are very optimistic that as the community delves in and begins working on
these data sets, they will reveal new insights into the brain circuits of
healthy adults," he said.
Subjects involved in the project have their brain scanned for a total of four
hours. For part of that time, they carry out a battery of tasks, which include
arithmetic, listening to stories, gambling and moving parts of their body.
Volunteers also engage in tests that assess their skills and abilities. In
addition, DNA samples are taken.
The scans are essentially a wiring diagram for each person's brain.
They show how different parts are connected by nerve fibres and also the
thickness of the bundles, which is thought to be an indication of the
importance or strength of a particular connection- a so-called "structural
map".
Scanning can also show which parts of the brain are activated for particular
tasks - known as a "functional map".
With all this information, researchers will be able to see if an individual's
brain wiring is related to their skills, such as musicality, sociability and
aptitude for science or maths.
Neural circuitry
According to Oxford University's Dr Tim Behrens, who is collaborating with Prof
Van Essen, the study will "uncover which neural pathways are important in
determining human behaviours".
The eventual aim of the project is to understand how the healthy human brain is
wired and how differences between individuals make each person unique - shaping
their personalities and their capacity to think and feel.
Prof Van Essen is excited by what may be revealed.
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The BBC's Pallab Ghosh gets a look at how his brain is wired
"We have the highest quality data of the entire human brain that the world has
ever seen. The question is that with more cutting edge (scanning) methods, how
much can we decipher the circuits that give us our distinctive capabilities?"
he said.
By learning more about how the healthy human brain works, the research will
inevitably be of use to those studying brain disorders, such as Alzheimer's and
Parkinson's.
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This could lead to a transformative set of developments that could accelerate
our knowledge of the brain
Prof Van Essen Washington University
Among those who will be delving through the data is Ed Bullmore, a professor of
psychiatry at Cambridge University. He believes that psychiatric problems, such
as schizophrenia, drug addiction and obsessive compulsive disorder generally
arise from irregular brain development.
Dementia
"We'll have a better opportunity to understand these disorders once we have a
better grip on normal brain development", he told BBC News.
The research data is also likely to help those seeking to stem or slow down
dementia. The study will undoubtedly lead to better ways of identifying those
most at risk from their brain scans.
An important aim of the 26m ($40m), five-year, US-government-funded project is
to share the data with scientists across the world.
Those behind the project were inspired by the way that the sharing of
information gleaned by the Human Genome project has spurred the acceleration of
genetic science. But this concept has been lower to take hold in brain imaging,
and the associated emerging field of neuroinformatics.
The problem has been the sheer complexity of the data and the ensuing
processing and analysis of the information.
For example, the images just released of the 68 subjects take up about two
terabytes of computer memory, which is two thousand billion bytes, enough to
fill several hundred DVDs.
The Human Connectome Project has therefore developed a database called
ConnectomeDB to make sharing of brain images much easier.
"In my optimistic view, I believe this will spur an acceleration in
neuroinformatics which will be able to acquire and analyse data [from brain
scans] in more powerful ways than has been possible up to this point.
"This in turn could lead to a transformative set of developments that could
accelerate our understanding of the brain," Prof Van Essen told BBC News.