Bad Dramas and Worse Neuroscience

Spoiler Alert: I can't believe I'm writing this, but don't read this post if you ever want to watch the K-drama "Boys Over Flowers" (netflix, hulu).

Okay, binge television.  You and I have had some good times.  In college it was Lost, Battlestar Galactica, and Firefly.  More recently, The Wire, Mad Men, Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad.  Hell, even Planet Earth.  I don't feel weird about these shows.

This show... this show.

But now, binge television, you had to see fit to introduce me to Korean dramas?  I mean, I normally binge on you because I don't know what's going to happen next.  Suspense, twists, etc.  But in this show, "Boys Over Flowers", I knew from the first episode I watched what the ending would be and yet I kept watching because I (embarrassingly) became way too emotionally invested in the well-being of the characters themselves.  The show is about a hardworking, spunky commoner girl, Geum JanDi, who through a stroke of fortune ends up attending high school at the elite ShinHwa Academy.  Of course, there are four rich, good-looking male heirs who attend there as well (the so-called "F4").  And yaddayadda Geum JanDi and the richest heir (Gu JunPyo) end up falling in love and whatnot.  Of course, before they can live happily ever after, there's a whole bunch of setbacks, starting from the initial courtship to the alternate love interest to the break-up phase to the make-up phase and then, just when it seems like things are finally going to work out...

(the spoiler is really coming now - if you're at all interested in watching this show, I warned you.  It is an amazing show, a terrible show, a rewarding show, a painful show, and way too guiltily addictive.)

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...there's a completely BS case of amnesia, where Gu JunPyo, after getting hit by a car, suddenly cannot remember Geum JanDi.  What???  Dear Reader, maybe this isn't connecting with you, but you have to understand the situation I was in.  It was 3 AM.  My girlfriend and I hadn't moved since like 6 PM, one-more-episoding our way until we were committed to finishing, in her words, in order to "stop the pain".  The end is in sight.  Then the dude hits his head and selectively forgets the love of his life?!?!?

It was a bit too much for this neuroscientist to handle.  You can forget *events*, but not people.  The only way for JunPyo to completely forget JanDi was if he completely forgot like two years of his life.  And there his friends were, trying to reenact specific events when they should have been like "Hey, do remember going to Macau?  Do you remember going to the ski resort?  Racing JiHoon on horseback?  What was all that about?"

The name for this general phenomenon is lacunar amnesia.  If you've blacked out from drinking too much, that episode is a lacuna (cool word).  It's pretty straightforward - we record memories of events based on when and where they happened, via brain structures called hippocampi.  If the recording is messed up, then you can lose the ability to recall that memory.  But if there's another event involving the same person, you would still know who that person was.  I mean, even if you lost all memories of events involving the person, I'd bet you'd still find them vaguely familiar, purely based on facial recognition.

So let this be a lesson to you future addictive television show writers - you can't just make a character entirely forget another.  Especially not when some of your viewers are just dying for the damn couple to be happy already!

Introducing the Brain Initiative

It's here!

No longer BAM (the Brain Activity Map project), but perhaps more appropriately acronymed to BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies).  Watch here as Obama officially announces the venture (with crowd shots of Big Deal neuroscientists).


(transcript)

Then read here for more official info:

• White House summary
• White House infographic
• White House fact sheet
• NIH summary

The quick rundown:

• public funding: $50M DARPA, $40M NIH, $20M NSF
• private funding: $60M Allen Brain Institute, $30M HHMI, $4M Kavli, $28M Salk Institute 

Finally, watch the Q&A with Tom Kalil, Dr. Arati Prabhakar (DARPA), and Dr. Francis Collins (NIH), which has some good nuggets in there:
  

Things I find interesting:

• The total dollar amount isn't Human Genome Project level - only ~$100M committed from public sources, and that just for FY2014.  No statement anywhere about recurrent funding, though the private foundations seem to be kicking in annual contributions.
• The money coming from NIH is being scraped together from existing neuroscience pots + a little discretionary.  So it's not like money for cancer is being diverted to neuro.
• Yeah they're still selling it on the "let's cure human diseases" thing.  Which won't happen, but hey.
• The team they've put together to decide on concrete goals looks pretty awesome.  It's also notably comprised of many names that were NOT involved with the initial planning of this venture so hopefully there will be some outside perspective.
• The fact that this team is in place suggests that they're well aware of the criticisms that the project goals were too fuzzy.  Even Partha Mitra was relieved:

@noahwg looks now like this will be a more realistic proposal to be shaped via a planning process, better chance of success
— Partha Mitra (@partha_mitra) April 2, 2013

Questions that remain unanswered:

• How will the money be distributed/apportioned/made available for grant proposal?
• What's the deal with the "brain observatories"?
• What will the reaction be?  Still not seeing anything really from the political sphere, or the media sphere. Perhaps this doesn't become an issue until Congress starts sinking its teeth into the budget.

BAM's (officially) coming!

Invited to White House by Obama for BAM announcement on Tuesday!!
— rafael yuste (@yusterafa) March 29, 2013

 Giddy times!

What I'm watching for:

How much money, for real?

We've heard $10 billion, $3 billion, and there's also that whole sequesterbudgetmess thing that could have altered the bottom line at the last minute.

Who gets it and how much goes to what?

What percentage will be set aside to establish the BAM "brain observatories"?  What percentage will be available for the general neuroscience community to apply for?  How much explicitly set aside for tech development?  People are going to either be pleasantly surprised by this, really upset by this, or annoyed that they don't explain this enough.  Probably all three.

Who pays for it?

If this means a drop in NIH funding for everyone else, people ain't gonna be happy - expect the science Angstosphere to flip a lot of figurative tables in that event. Of course, no one wants that to happen, including none of the BAM scientists themselves.  It's only the White House that can screw up the funding.

How will Obama sell it?

Really interested to see if it's still all about Alzheimer's and humans or about what the scientists are actually proposing.  Will his statement become fodder for Twittersnark or will the skeptics be impressed? 

What will the Republicans say?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I haven't seen any political coverage of BAM.  From my understanding, the Republicans still aren't big fans of the President, and they really don't like spending money.  On the other hand, they don't mind neuroscience as far as I know.  So... what will their statements say?  Bland?  Harsh?  Enthusiastic? Will they say anything at all?

Will the media care?

Lead story? One minute in the nightly news?  Overlooked completely?  The media needs a comparison or they won't know how to report it.  I'm fully expect comparisons to the Human Genome Project, but the cynic in me won't be satisfied until I hear some commentator explaining how BAM is nothing like putting a man on the moon. 

And if it's going to happen - when?

Hey, I want my slice of the pie already!

Can Neuroscience Ever Fully Explain Subjective Consciousness?

No.

Of moon backsides and ocean bottoms

Lazy Hook (n) - An overused rhetorical device used by writers who can't think of anything novel to engage their readers' attention.  That guy used a dictionary-style definition to start his post - what a lazy hook.

Today's Lazy Hook comes from the world of oceanography, where this aphorism has proved irresistible:

It’s an oft-repeated anecdote [note the misuse of "anecdote"] of ocean researchers that we know more about the moon than about the bottom of our own oceans.

On the one hand, there's the moon.  It's a thing, and a place.  Go outside and you can see it from your front porch.  "Wow," you might say to yourself, "that is a place that is hard to get to."  Now look out at the ocean, which you can also see from your front porch if, for example, you're me (deal with it, plebs).  "Wow," you say again, "that is also a place.  However I can get there by walking for five minutes."  Enter trite science writer: "Did you know that we know more about the surface of the moon than we do about the bottom of the ocean?"  And cue your mind exploding.

Then, as your mind starts putting its pieces back together, it might wonder, "Really?  Why are we comparing the moon to the ocean?"

First, some history.  Roger Revelle.  He's the famous geologist of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, which is a beach-side resort research-center in San Diego.  The place became very successful while he was there, and eventually decided it needed a university attached to it, so Revelle went and made UCSD happen (true story). 

Some time during the prime of  his career (the '50s-'70s) Roger Revelle originated the saying that would later be attributed to him in his obituary: "We know less about the ocean's bottom than the moon's back side."

Back then, this was apropos.  Lunar exploration was beginning scientifically and was already culturally profound.  Plus, we REALLY didn't know anything about what was going on at the bottom of the ocean.  Therefore it makes sense that Revelle, a geologist by training, would be interested in comparing the moon and ocean floor: here were two landscapes with interesting geographies and geologies, yet one - the far away one - was more explored.  Back then, it was novel and fitting - an effective hook.

But now...

Observe how the comparison is dredged up in contexts it doesn't belong in.  From UC Santa Cruz:

There’s a cliché in science:  We know more about our moon than the ocean’s depths.  And yet the sea remains Earth’s greatest frontier.  A reservoir of heat and life, the ocean controls and reacts to Earth's climate in myriad ways. Winds, currents, and nutrients dictate which species survive and where. Unknown stresses force so me [sic] microbes to release dangerous toxins. These cycles, from local to global, drive the research of ocean scientists at UC Santa Cruz.

How can you read that and not simply think, "Well, okay.  So I guess there's just more to know about the ocean?"  Because that's the uninteresting truth.  By that standard, there's more to know about a baboon's back-side than about the back side of the moon, but do primatologists claim to be studying  the final frontier?

For another example of the moon Frontierifying the ocean, let's return to the Discover magazine piece to see the Lazy Hook in its entirety:

It’s an oft-repeated anecdote of ocean researchers that we know more about the moon than about the bottom of our own oceans. Humans meet our match when it comes to probing cold deep bodies of water.

We are drawn to the deep by its ancient mysteries, chilling down below. But we also come up against our limitations there, battling against equipment failure, aching cold, and the frontiers of technology.

Research in the deep reveals the sometimes-shy face of science that turns away from a soundbite-infatuated media: halting, meticulous, even serendipitous. Like space exploration, exploring the deep can be delicate and dangerous—a stage for human victories and heart-rending mistakes. 

What a load of saccharine rah-rah.  Challenge!  Triumph!  Heartache!  The human conquest of the depths!

Is this really necessary to justify ocean research?  Read the rest of the piece here.  Notice how after that opening, the article hilariously forgets those stirring themes.  It's just a pretty straightforward look at four cool stories of ocean/lake science.  And none of those stories, by the way, deal with anything that can be remotely compared to the moon!  So why the need to motivate the reader with BS?

The right way to use the moon-ocean comparison is to restrict it within its original Revellian context.  As Gene Feldman puts it in an interview with NASA:

But even with all the technology that we have today -- satellites, buoys, underwater vehicles and ship tracks -- we have better maps of the surface of Mars and the moon than we do the bottom of the ocean. We know very, very little about most of the ocean. This is especially true for the middle and deeper parts far away from the coasts. 

See, science writers?  If you're talking geography (and maybe geology) it's fair to hook your audience by comparing the moon and ocean floor.  If you're talking biology, physical chemistry, or climate then go find yourself another angle.

Clarifying BAM

A new white paper is out in Science Express today, written by many of those involved in the Brain Activity Map project (BAM).  It's paywalled, so I thought I'd share some initial key quotes from it and my reactions:

First, they seem highly aware of the criticisms - born of the comparison to the Human Genome Project - that BAM had vague goals.  Here they make directly explicit what was a bit fuzzy beforehand:

The BAM project is essentially a technology-building research program with three goals: (i) to build new classes of tools that can simulta-neously image or record the individual activity of most, or even all, neurons in a brain circuit, including those containing millions of neu-rons; (ii) to create tools to control the activity of every neuron individually in these circuits, because testing function requires intervention; and (iii) to understand circuit function. 

So, yes - this IS just tech dev.  Will be interesting to see if the "But this isn't a moon shot!!!!!!" critics will chill out after this.  Probably not.

Next, they have scaled back their ambitions.  No longer is it even mentioned that in 15 years research could be progressing towards primates (among those, humans).  Instead, they restrict themselves to the following timeline:

Within 5 years, it should be possible to monitor and/or to control tens of thousands of neurons, and by year 10 that number will increase at least 10-fold. By year 15, observing 1 million neurons with markedly reduced invasiveness should be possible. 

Note that human brains have 90 billion neurons.  They're talking about, at best, getting to a large chunk of mouse cortex in 15 years (still no easy feat), which should inure them to some of the criticism based on infeasibility/unreasonableness.

And among the model organisms they will use prior to mice:

Invertebrates such as the worm, fly, or leech are ideal for testing new technologies, where the results can be compared to extensive, growing bodies of data on the functions of identified neurons and smaller-scale circuits.

Sup.

(I study leech neuro... it's pretty cool that the leech gets a shout-out here, as it's usually not on the shortlist of invert experimental organisms [that stops at worm and fly].  Bit of an oversight, though, that they omit the crab stomatogastric ganglion, as Eve Marder is also involved in this).

Next, there's a lot of blahblah about connections to human clinical work and diseases and such.  Lots of "may lead to" sentences and whatnot:

We believe that tools and knowledge created by the BAM project may lead to new approaches to rebalance disordered networks and treat [strokes, cerebral palsy, amyotrophic lat-eral sclerosis, or spinal cord injury].

Finally, there's another statement designed to soothe the critics:

We believe this initiative should be funded by a partnership between federal and private organizations. It is essential that those funds not be taken away from existing neuroscience initiatives, which we view as crucial. In addition, data from the BAM project should be made immediately public and accessible to all researchers.

So in sum, the new white paper doesn't add all that much - although it does clarify their goals and tighten up the proposal in response to criticism.  There're no new details about the "brain observatories" idea that's floated around in some press and interviews.  There's no new details about how the money will be structured.  And the biggest question still remains unexplored:

Will Congress even want to fund this?

BRAIN links

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Please find the updated version of this post on the tab above:

http://empiricalplanet.blogspot.com/p/brain-initiative-links.html


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Here be a repository for BAM BRAIN Initiative links!  If you have something I've missed (and I've probably missed tons) then please comment or hit me up @jipkin.  I'll endeavor to update this as the story progresses.

On the Internets:

Physical Principles for Scalable Neural Recording (arXiv) (July 2, 2013)
Physical principles for scalable neural recording (John Hewitt, medical express) (July 2, 2013)

Building a Brain (CBC Quirks) (June 22, 2013)
Hunting for the Brain's Hidden Treasures (SciAm, Dwayne Godwin, Jorge Chan) (July 1, 2013)
Reviewing the BRAIN Project (ASMB today, Jeremy Berg) (June, 2013)
Why mapping the brain matters (Nature Methods, editorial) (May 30, 2013)

Why You Should Care about Pentagon Funding of Obama’s BRAIN Initiative (SciAm, John Horgan) (May 22, 2013)
Update on the Great BRAINI Debates (Nucleus Ambiguous, Michael Carroll) (May 12, 2013)
My thoughts on the first BRAIN initiative meeting (Dam Bumbarger) (May 9, 2013)
Where are the BRAINI women? (Erin McKiernan) (May 9, 2013)
Neuroscientists put heads together at national brainstorming session (Medical Express, John Hewitt) (May 8, 2013) 
BRAIN feedback at NIH (NIH)
BRAIN Initiative (Scientopia, DrugMonkey) (May 7, 2013)
Workshop on the Physical and Mathematical Principles of Brain Structure and Function (NSF) (May 5-7, 2013)
#nsfBRAINmtg live blogging of DATA topic , THEORY , ELECTRICAL (Joshua Vogelstein, May 6, 2013)
livestream channel with VODs of nsfBRAINmtg (Livestream, May 5-7, 2013)
Neuroscientists brainstorm goals for US brain-mapping initiative (Nature, Helen Shen) (May 6, 2013)

From BAM to The BRAIN Initiative: A clearer view of a major neuroscience enterprise (The Incubator, Gabrielle Rabinowitz) (May 3, 2013)   

Interview with BRAIN Project Pioneer: Miyoung Chun (MIT tech review, Jason Pontin) (April 15, 2013) 
The BRAIN Initiative, first thoughts (Scientopia, DrugMonkey) (April 15, 2013) 
Why The Human BRAIN Initiative Is So Important To All Of Us! (HuffPo, Daniel Burrus) (April 17, 2013) [this is a funnily terrible article] 

An open letter to Larry Swanson: Why it is important for neuroscientists to debate the Brain Initiative in public (Justin Kiggins) (April 15, 2013) 
2 More Reasons Why Big Brain Projects Are Premature (SciAm, John Horgan) (April 10, 2013)

The ENCODE project: Missteps overshadowing a success (Current Biology, Sean Eddy) (April 8, 2013)
The BRAIN Initiative: BAM or BUST? (SciAm, Scicurious) (April 8, 2013)
The Moon is not Made of Cheese and Other Hypotheses (Nucleus Ambiguous, Michael Carroll) (April 8, 2013)

Skepticism about Obama's Brain Project (New Savanna, Bill Benzon) (April 7, 2013)
To crack human brain's code, a search for visionaries (Reuters, Deborah Zabarenko) (April 7, 2013)
What do you think of Obama's proposed "BRAIN Initiative"? (Quora discussion) (April 7, 2013)
Neuroscience needs its Einstein (Salon, Jonathon Keats) (April 6, 2013) 
Some still skeptical of BRAIN initiative as details remain fuzzy (Fierce Biotech Research, Emily Mullin) (April 5, 2013)
Obama's Brain Map Initiative Needs a Rethinking (Live Science, Donald Stein) (April 6, 2013)
Colbert gets fake EEG'd (Oscillatory Thoughts, Bradley Voytek) (April 4, 2013)  

Now or Then: Which Big Science Project are These Scientists Worked Up About (Wired, Greg Miller) (April 5, 2013)
A Leader of Obama's New BRAIN Initiative Explains Why We Need It (Wired, Greg Miller) (April 3, 2013) 
As White House Embraces BRAIN Initiative, Questions Linger (Science Insider, Emily Underwood) (April 3, 2013) 
Will Obama's new $100m brain mapping project be open access? (Open Knowledge) (April 4, 2013)
From Junk DNA to Junk Economics: Beware the Inexorable Sovietization of Big Science (Bio IT, Bill Frezza) (April 3, 2013) 
BRAIN (Scientopia, Neuropolarbear) (April 3, 2013) 
On The Frontiers of Brain Research (NYTimes, Editorial Board) (April 2, 2013) 
Obama's BRAIN Initiative (The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert) (April 4, 2013) 

BRAIN Initiative Challenges Researchers to Unlock Mysteries of Human Mind (whitehouse) (April 2, 2013)
Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative (NIH) (April 2, 2013)
DARPA/NIH/OSTP Twitter Q&A (whitehouse) (April 2, 2013)
President Obama Speaks on the BRAIN Initiative and American Innovation (whitehouse) (April 2, 2013)

A New Push To Explore the Brain (The Loom, Carl Zimmer) (April 2, 2013)
Obama's BRAIN Initiative is a huge boost for new neurotechnology (extremetech, John Hewitt) (April 3, 2013)
President Obama's brain map project is hardly the next Human Genome (guardian, Erin McKiernan) (April 2, 2013)
Introducing the BRAIN Initiative (empiricalplanet, Jason Pipkin)
BRAIN Initiative (nee BAM) Made Officially Palatable (Nucleus Ambiguous, Michael Carroll) (April 2, 2013)
Obama: 'Braaaaaaains.' Partha Mitra: 'Whoa there, buddy.' (WaPo Wonkblog, Dylan Matthews) (April 3, 2013) this is misleadingly titled... Mitra is actually pretty much ok with the latest proposal from his answers.
Obama Invests in Brain-Mapping Project (KQED) (April 3, 2013) hate this title - they removed the "map" part for a reason when they went from BAM to BRAIN.
Barack Obama, Neuroscientist in Chief? (Brain Facts, Dwayne Goodwin) 

BAM, federal funding, and patents (Erin McKiernan) (March 30, 2013)
Somewhere Over the Brainbow: The Journey To Map the Human Brain (NPR) (March 31, 2013)
BAM's (officially) coming! (empiricalplanet, Jason Pipkin)

Is Brain Mapping Ready for Big Science? (GenEngNews, Patricia Dimond) (March 29, 2013) Rafael Yuste: More Bucks for the BAM (Nucleus Ambiguous, Michael Carroll) (March 14, 2013)
Obama's Brain Activity Map Needs a Compass (Real Clear Science, Brad Dickerson) (March 13, 2013)
  
The Three-Billion Dollar Brain (New Yorker, Gary Marcus) (March 12, 2013)
What's Not Wrong with the BAM Project and How to Fix It (Nucleus Ambiguous, Michael Carroll) (March 10, 2013)
Do the BAM Proponents Even Understand Open Access? (Nucleus Ambiguous, Michael Carroll) (March 9, 2013) 
Hard Cell (The Economist) (March 9, 2013)
Clarifying BAM (empiricalplanet) (March 7, 2013)

Behind the scenes of a brain mapping moon shot (Nature, Meredith Wadman) (March 6, 2013)
What's Wrong with the Brain Activity Map Project (Scientific American, Partha Mitra) (March 5, 2013)
Partha Mitra Makes no Sense (to me) (empiricalplanet, Jason Pipkin) (March 5, 2013) 
What is the Brain Activity Map? George Church Q&A (Kurzweil) (March 4, 2013) 
The Bloating of BAM and how to sell big brain science (empiricalplanet, Jason Pipkin) (March 3, 2013)

What's a connectome good for anyway? (empiricalplanet, Jason Pipkin) (March 1, 2013)
Proposed Brain Activity Map may also advance nanotechnology (Foresight, James Lewis) (March 1, 2013)
How the Brain Activity Map came together (Spoonful of Medicine, Nature Blog, Virginia Hughes) (March 1, 2013)
Neuroscience! Because Alzheimer's! (NeuroDojo, Zen Faulkes) (Feb 28, 2013)
BAM and the Molecular Ticker Tape (Nucleus, Ambiguous, Michael Carroll) - love this one! (Feb 27, 2013)
Bang or BAM? On respecting complex problems (Pascal's Pensees, Pascal Wallisch) (Feb 27, 2013)

A Manhattan Project to Map the Brain? (Brain Facts, Dwayne Godwin) (Feb 27, 2013)
A 3 Billion Dollar Mistake (The Incubator, Gabrielle Rabinowitz) (Feb 25, 2013)
Finding the Treasure: A practical view on where the Brain Activity Map will lead us (Neurdiness, Grace Lindsay) (Feb 24, 2013) 
BAM Matters (Nucleus Ambiguous, Michael Carroll) (Feb 24, 2013)
Brain activity map: boondoggle or bonanza? (Out of the Fog, Chris Palmer [former labmate of mine!]) (Feb 24, 2013)

Brain Project Draws Presidential Interest (Science Insider, Emily Underwood and Jocelyn Kaiser) - source of some good info! (Feb 20, 2013)
BAM! My thoughts on Big Bucks for Big Brain Science (Nucleus Ambiguous, Michael Carroll) (Feb 19, 2013)
BAM! Let's do neuroscience!(empiricalplanet, Jason Pipkin) (Feb 18, 2013)
BAM! Mind control! (empiricalplanet, Jason Pipkin) (Feb 18, 2013)
Brain Activity Map: Every Spike from Every Neuron (Bob Blum) - nice science overview! (Feb 18, 2013)

Major Media:

Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain (original newsbreak - NY Times)
Connecting the Neural Dots (NY Times follow-up)
Brain Activity Map Project (wikipedia)
    
Science Chronology:
 
Chicheley Meeting White Paper (no link, but there existed a white paper made by some of the people who met at the Kavli International Meeting in September 2011.  This would later go on to become BAM)
The Brain Activity Map Project and the Challenge of Functional Connectomics (June 2012, Neuron.  Initial look at what six of the scientists involved came up with).  
Data Deluge from the Brain Activity Map (Summary from January 2013 Caltech meeting)
The Brain Activity Map (Science, BAM major players)
Nanotools for Neuroscience and Brain Activity Mapping (ACS Nano, BAM players) 

Science Background:

Of Toasters and Molecular Ticker Tapes (PLOS compbio - first suggestion of using DNA to record neural activity at single-spike resolution, I believe)
Sequencing the Connectome (PLOS bio - Tony Zador group idea that might be explored with BAM)

Steering Committee:

Cori Bargmann
Bill Newsome
David Anderson
Emery Brown
Karl Deisseroth
John Donoghue
Peter MacLeish
Eve Marder
Richard Norman
Joshua Sanes
Mark Schnitzer
Terry Sejnowski
David Tank
Roger Tsien
Kamil Ugurbil

Ex Officio members:
Kathy Hudson (NIH) (went to my alma mater apparently)
Geoffrey Ling (DARPA)  
  
Note that this committee is dominated by scientists, not technologists.  I'm told that this was the intent - to only include tech people that were interested in applications (Ugurbil, Tsien, Deisseroth) not for the sake of tech.  The ostensible goal of this committee is to rally the larger neuro community and design the 2014 project goals, then the later goals. 

Major Players:

Rafael Yuste (includes some good links to his media appearances) 
George Church
Miyoung Chun
Ralph Greenspan
Paul Alivisatos
Michael Roukes
John Donoghue
Terry Sejnowski
Larry Swanson
Clay Reid
Christof Koch
Karl Deisseroth
Eve Marder 
Sebastian Seung
Paul McEuen
Paul Weiss