“CAN THE HUMAN BRAIN understand the human brain?” asks David Van Essen. “Perhaps never.”
Despite those doubts, Van Essen is co- principal investigator of the Human Connectome Project (HCP), an international effort to map out the “wiring” of the human brain. Among the goals is to reveal what, exactly, all the different parts of the brain do.
Van Essen calls himself a “brain cartographer” and compares the brain to the Earth: The planet’s surface, with its many geographic rumples and folds (known to us as valleys and mountains), is analogous to the wrinkles of the brain. While these geographical features are significant, the need-to-know information “is the political subdivisions and social organization—what we think of as states and countries—that are created by the organization and communications amongst the billions of people on the planet,” he says. Similarly, when it comes to understanding how the human mind works, what matters more than the location of the almost 100 billion neurons in the brain is how they are wired and communicate. The connectome Van Essen seeks is essentially a wiring diagram of the brain.