title: On brain activity mapping: insights and lessons from Brain Decoding Project to map memory patterns in the hippocampus.
abstract: The BRAIN project recently announced by the president Obama is the reflection of unrelenting human quest for cracking the brain code, the patterns of neuronal activity that define who we are and what we are. While the Brain Activity Mapping proposal has rightly emphasized on the need to develop new technologies for measuring every spike from every neuron, it might be helpful to consider both the theoretical and experimental aspects that would accelerate our search for the organizing principles of the brain code. Here we share several insights and lessons from the similar proposal, namely, Brain Decoding Project that we initiated since 2007. We provide a specific example in our initial mapping of real-time memory traces from one part of the memory circuit, namely, the CA1 region of the mouse hippocampus. We show how innovative behavioral tasks and appropriate mathematical analyses of large datasets can play equally, if not more, important roles in uncovering the specific-to-general feature-coding cell assembly mechanism by which episodic memory, semantic knowledge, and imagination are generated and organized. Our own experiences suggest that the bottleneck of the Brain Project is not only at merely developing additional new technologies, but also the lack of efficient avenues to disseminate cutting edge platforms and decoding expertise to neuroscience community. Therefore, we propose that in order to harness unique insights and extensive knowledge from various investigators working in diverse neuroscience subfields, ranging from perception and emotion to memory and social behaviors, the BRAIN project should create a set of International and National Brain Decoding Centers at which cutting-edge recording technologies and expertise on analyzing large datasets analyses can be made readily available to the entire community of neuroscientists who can apply and schedule to perform cutting-edge research.
authors.affiliation: Brain and Behavior Discovery Institute, Medical College of Georgia, Georgia Regents University, Augusta, GA 30912, USA. jtsien@gru.edu
authors.forename: Joe Z
authors.initials: JZ
authors.lastname: Tsien
authors.forename: Meng
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Li
authors.forename: Remus
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Osan
authors.forename: Guifen
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.forename: Longnian
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Lin
authors.forename: Phillip Lei
authors.initials: PL
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Sabine
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Frey
authors.forename: Julietta
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Frey
authors.forename: Dajiang
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Zhu
authors.forename: Tianming
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: Fang
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Zhao
authors.forename: Hui
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Kuang
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001931:Brain Mapping; D056547:CA1 Region, Hippocampal / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008568:Memory; D051379:Mice