Big initiatives to understand the workings of the brain

Neuroscience has a data problem. In our efforts to understand the brain researchers are generating ever greater amounts of data. The problem is, how can they gain meaning from it?

A recent study, that used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data to produce the most detailed map to date of the human cortex, looked at data from 210 peoples’ brains. The researchers estimated that equated to 30 gigabytes of data per participant. Meaning over 6 terabytes of data were analyzed to form the map, and this was a study of a large section of cortex, not the whole brain.