brain activity project

obama has recently announced the brain activity project which promises to be a 10 year multi billion project to study brain activity. a recent new york times article discusses project approach:

The advent of new technology that allows scientists to identify firing neurons in the brain has led to numerous brain research projects around the world. Yet the brain remains one of the greatest scientific mysteries.

Composed of roughly 100 billion neurons that each electrically “spike” in response to outside stimuli, as well as in vast ensembles based on conscious and unconscious activity, the human brain is so complex that scientists have not yet found a way to record the activity of more than a small number of neurons at once, and in most cases that is done invasively with physical probes.

But a group of nanotechnologists and neuroscientists say they believe that technologies are at hand to make it possible to observe and gain a more complete understanding of the brain, and to do it less intrusively.

In June in the journal Neuron, six leading scientists proposed pursuing a number of new approaches for mapping the brain.

this is a different methodology from the european hbp (human brain project) which is a bottom-up computational simulation of the brain. according to the article: 

Critics, however, say the simulation (of the european hbp) will be built on knowledge that is still theoretical, incomplete or inaccurate.

the american project promises to be based on observation and empirical evidence to build a "map" of brain activity and process. it will be exciting when the many different teams begin to pool findings and when these findings flow into ai application...