This fall (2010) , on 11 university campuses in the United States and Europe, scientists have embarked on a $40-million, five-year, federally sponsored project to redraw the map. They are using new incarnations of imaging technology to vastly improve the basic understanding of the connections that wire together the brain, in the hope that their work may help people with debilitating mental conditions like Alzheimer's disease and severe autism.

It's called the Human Connectome Project, a name chosen to invoke the groundbreaking significance of last decade's Human Genome Project, a chart of human DNA. And while that $3-billion endeavor had to map approximately 25,000 genes, the Connectome Project, with much less money, will try to bring order to a system of some 100 billion neurons in each human brain.

http://humanconnectome.org/consortia/

The NIH Human Connectome Project is an ambitious effort to map the neural pathways that underlie human brain function. The overarching purpose of the Project is to acquire and share data about the structural and functional connectivity of the human brain. It will greatly advance the capabilities for imaging and analyzing brain connections, resulting in improved sensitivity, resolution, and utility, thereby accelerating progress in the emerging field of human connectomics.

Altogether, the Human Connectome Project will lead to major advances in our understanding of what makes us uniquely human and will set the stage for future studies of abnormal brain circuits in many neurological and psychiatric disorders.