Survey: The Ultimate Goal of Neuroscience

I am planning a blog post on what the Ultimate Goal of Neuroscience is. I would like to make a survey first, to hear from all you neuroscientists out there, what you think, is the big goal of neuroscience. I will present the results in this blog and write a commentary on it.

The question is: “Given unlimited ressources (infinite time – yes immortatlity, people, money, technology, everything), what would be the ultimate goal or ultimate application that would crown your neuroscientific work?”

Please write your brief(!) answer in the comments below, or twitter (don’t forget to adress me: @DennisEckmeier)! Please be creative! ‘Duh, everything.’ does not count! And spread the word!

How I came up with this:

I have been confronted uncounted times by fellow neuroscientists with questions like ‘yeah, that’s all very interesting, but why is this relevant?’. And I am usually somewhat confused, because I just explained what the problem is and how I addressed it and I thought the relevance was clear.

Currently, there is a lot of discussion going on about the Brain Activity Map (BAM) project, that is being proposed as a big project eating up hundreds of billions of dollars in the US and the Blue Brain project, that already has been accepted and will be funded with 500 billion Euros by the European Union. BAM seeks out to measure the activity of all neurons in human brains to find out how the firing of any neuron is dependend on the spiking activity of any other neuron in the human brain. The Blue Brain Project will try to make a computer model of a complete human brain. Both claim to be able to adress major questions in neuroscience and are critisized for completely missing the point by many.

This all shows that neuroscientists have very different views on what we are actually doing here, what is relevant and what the ultimate goal of neuroscience should be. I love big picture discussions, so I would love to hear your statements!