California Maps the Brain to Unlock Its Secrets

The human brain has more than 150 million neurons, so scientist Ralph Greenspan knows that 2 million dollars might not get him all that far in his quest to map all of those neural connections… but it’s a start. Greenspan is the director of UC San Diego’s Center for Brain Activity Mapping and associate director of its Kavil Institute for Brain and Mind. He’s one of the brains behind Cal-BRAIN, the new California Blueprint for Research to Advance Innovations in Neuroscience. It’s funded by the state budget the Governor just signed last week and is part of a national effort to decode the brain in the same way as the human genome project decodes our genetic makeup.