ILLUSTRATION BY SINELAB
WHEN THINGS GO RIGHT, the brain is our most trustworthy ally, sharing all our experiences, affirming our beliefs and helping us act on our passions. The mass of soft tissue suspended beneath the skull is your soul mate— until it turns, as it often does, into a source of pain. For some, mental or cognitive distress is a temporary challenge; for others, it can be an intractable and devastating problem. And despite everything we’ve learned about the biomechanics of the human body, we’re still in kindergarten when it comes to the workings of the brain. It’s our biological black box: We can figure out what goes in and most of what comes out, but we know almost nothing of what goes on inside.
We’re starting to learn, though, thanks to innovations like diffusion tensor imaging, which can show how damage caused by disease or injury prevents signals from traveling between brain cells. Meanwhile, the ambitiously funded BRAIN Initiative in the U.S. and Human Brain Project in the EU are drawing talent and resources into the field. Researchers have begun to map the brain into distinct functional regions and are learning to read messages from patterns of neuronal electrical activity—projects that could change the way we treat problems as wide-ranging as paralysis and Alzheimer’s, and that show we’re finally getting smart about our brains.