Brain Mapping

When I first heard this story, this morning on the news the first thing I thought...Fox News will spin this that the Obama Administration has enacted a program to control our minds...I can see this story being spun this way and I can just read the misguided headlines of bloggers who live in their mother's basement, sitting at a computer screen in their underwear....

This is just how they'll take it...So before we get all crazy...Here are the facts...There is
a  human brain research program that could point to new strategies for dealing with illnesses such as Alzheimer's disease, Epilepsy and Autism  unveiled by the White House yesterday.

President Barack Obama was due to launch the so called BRAIN Initiative, which a White House official touted as a "bold, new” move “designed to recognize our understanding of the human brain."

It follows a pledge the President made in his State of the Union address, when he spoke of creating jobs through research and development.

"If we want to make the best products, we also have to invest in the best ideas,” he said in this address last month. “Every dollar we invested to map the human genome returned $140 to our economy.”

The project will be jump-started with a $100 million investment in 2014, the White House said, although the scientists who inspired the idea say the focus is not so much raising money as harnessing new technologies to uncover the secrets of neural function less expensively and more completely.

It will boost the development of technology that will allow researchers to produce dynamic pictures of the brain that show how individual brain cells and complex neural circuits interact at the speed of thought.

Ultimately, that could help find a way to treat or prevent brain disorders such as Alzheimer's disease, Epilepsy, Parkinson's disease, Autism and Schizophrenia.

The $100 million funding will come from the National Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation, the White House said....and not the taxpayers ...Hear that Repubs?

So did you read that right wing conspiracy theorists?  It's not a project to control your minds (or what little you may have left) Did you hear this Republican Congress??, Fox News??...This is actually a good thing that may actually help people (Imagine that!)...It's why we have Doctors and Scientists...To advance medicine and health...This is not a wasteful program... I'm sure it will be spun that way.

I can hear the spin doctors and the nuts now....I just thought I'd tell you all the facts  first...