On April 2, 2013, the then president of the United States Barack Obama announced the launch of the so-called “BRAIN Initiative” or Brain Activity Map Project, a human brain research project devised by the Spanish neurobiologist Rafael Yuste, with an initial budget of 100 million dollars and a duration of 15 years, whose main objective is to map the neuronal activity of the brain in order to understand its functioning.

Participated by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Allen Institute for Brain Science, the Kavli Foundation or the Salk Institute for Biological Studies among others.

The BRAIN initiative is developed in an analogous way to the Human Genome Project, a global scientific project that was promoted with the objective of identifying more than 20,000 genes that make up the human genome, with the collaboration of more than 500 laboratories around the world, and will have a budget close to 600 million dollars.

Among the objectives of the project is the development of a set of tools that make it easier to obtain an image of the brain in action, from which it is possible to understand how we think, learn or memorize, in order to help scientists work and study. the human brain to understand its functioning and discover the secrets and possible treatments of degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other degenerative pathologies, for this it is of capital importance to map neuronal activity, the main objective, on which the rest of the objectives included in the BRAIN Initiative.

This is how the aim is to record the activity and record the communications of the more than 70 billion neurons that the brain is estimated to have, a purpose as complex and difficult as it is grandiose, which will generate enormous amounts of data that must be processed and analyzed.

To get an idea of the complexity of the task, the central nervous system, which includes the brain and spinal cord, is basically composed of two types of cells, neurons responsible for receiving, processing and transmitting information through chemical signals. and electrical, and glial cells called astrocytes and oligodendrocytes which perform functions of support and protection of neurons, these are made up of three parts, the cell body, the axon and the dendrite, communicating between them by sending chemical substances called neurotransmitters through of small spaces between the axons and dendrites of adjacent neurons. Well, the project aims to know when, with how many and why a neuron communicates with its neighbors or with others in other areas or regions of the brain when an event occurs or when a movement is made, or to know what difference occurs in the brain when a person with Parkinson’s performs a movement when the same movement is performed by someone without the disease.

From there, countless studies will be carried out to understand its functioning, in order to identify and identify treatments for diseases such as Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s, and to understand the behavior of the brain in people with intellectual disabilities, depression or diseases such as schizophrenia, attention deficit disorder (ADHD) or post-traumatic stress disorder.

However, since the announcement of the BRAIN initiative, many have considered it overly ambitious and unrealistic, arguing that it is not possible with current technology and means to map the activity of thousands of million neurons, something that has not yet been achieved ten years after the start of the project, the greatest achievement being the mapping of more than a million neurons carried out in the cortex of a mouse, through a microscopy technique capable of capture detailed images of the activity of a large number of cells, across different levels of depth in the brain at high speed and with unprecedented clarity.

But despite everything, it is true that the BRAIN project, in these ten years, has improved the understanding of how the brain encodes and processes information, identifying specific patterns of neuronal activity associated with auditory or visual stimuli, allowing the development of new techniques. of brain stimulation, such as deep brain stimulation capable of relieving Parkinson’s symptoms, and has allowed progress in the search for algorithms that can analyze and interpret large-scale neural data, such as machine learning algorithms capable of predicting patterns of brain activity , as well as has promoted the development of imaging techniques and tools to study the brain from individual neurons to entire networks of neurons, such as;

• Ontogenetics, based on the use of light to control neuronal activity, and allow neuronal circuits to be manipulated in real time.
• Calcium Imaging tracking, a system capable of tracking the activity of individual neurons by measuring changes in intracellular calcium levels.
• Multiple Electrodes, through which it is possible to record the activity of multiple neurons simultaneously.

Given the complexity of the BRAIN Initiative in these 10 years, some aspects have remained very far from what was expected, thus the identification of neural circuits involved in the coordination of complex behaviors or cognitive processes is still a dream more than a realistic objective, and the The development of tools that allow us to integrate data from different circuits to perform analyzes at different levels in order to develop a comprehensive understanding of brain functions is not yet possible.

The advances in therapies and treatments derived from the studies carried out to date constitute hypotheses and preliminary trials for future therapies, rather than realities for the improvement of any of the initially planned diseases.

However, perhaps the great discovery, or the great surprise, has been the beginning of the ethical debate raised by the same scientists related to the project, who consider that once knowledge of the functioning of the brain is achieved, human beings will be in a position to manipulate people’s thoughts, proposing the creation of ethical rules, called neurorights, with the same scope as the rest of the precepts included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, even proposing that these neurorights become an expansion of the themselves, in the not too distant future, in a way that guarantees the right to mental privacy, personal identity and free will

The transfer to society and even to the intellectual, philosophical and legal world, of these concerns, is a sign of the optimism and conviction that exists in the achievement of the stated objectives, otherwise, initially with the BRAIN Initiative , perhaps with upcoming more advanced and more specific programs, which allow us, through the optimization of resources, to discover the functioning of our central processes, constantly and gradually until the moment arrives we are effectively able to fully understand how our brain works.