… The Mystery of Consciousness. It’s one of the biggest unknowns, right up there with the origin of life. But it’s under a multi-pronged assault by scientists, who vow to crack the code of the mind in the same way that they are deciphering the human genome. It’s all very exciting, with the one catch that no one can really agree on what the mind IS.

“With consciousness, there is no agreement on anything,” says Giulio Tononi, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, “except it’s very difficult.”

Jim Olds, who directs George Mason University’s Krasnow Institute, a think tank devoted to the study of the mind, says of his field, “We’re waiting for our Einstein.”

The human brain is a hunk of meat that weighs about 3 pounds. It contains about 30 billion cells, called neurons. The networking of these cells involves 100 trillion meeting points, or synapses…

Earlier this year, Jim Olds gathered a bunch of big thinkers at George Mason University for a two-day conference on the mind. He and his allies want the federal government to invest $4 billion in an initiative that would be called the “Decade of the Mind.” This would be a follow-up to a 1990s program called the “Decade of the Brain,” which brought increased attention to neuroscience.

The new initiative would be an attempt to take science into a realm previously explored only by philosophers, theologians and mountaintop yogis.

“Brain science is an exhaustive collection of facts without a theory,” Olds says. “This is for the nation as a whole to invest in one of the fundamental intellectual questions of what it is to be a human being.”

In a letter published a few weeks ago in the journal Science, 10 scientists said that a Decade of the Mind would help us understand mental disorders that affect 50 million Americans and cost more than $400 billion a year. It might also aid in the development of intelligent machines and new computing techniques. A breakthrough in mind research, the scientists wrote, could have “broad and dramatic impacts on the economy, national security, and our social well-being.”

There’s reason to be optimistic. Look at what has happened in recent years with the development of brain scans, such as MRIs, that let us observe the brain at work in real time. As the technology improves, the brain becomes more transparent, less of a black box…

Source: Daily Press, VA
http://www.dailypress.com/news/opinion/dp-out_mind_0930sep30,0,4908398.story