A major international collaboration will seek new understanding of the brain, it was announced today.
Leading neuroscientists are calling their project the International Brain Lab.
Groups from the UK, the USA, France, Switzerland and Portugal will work together backed by £10 million from the Wellcome Trust.
Their aim is to find out how the brain controls learning and decision making.
They aim to standardise experimental techniques across their laboratories.
Researcher Professor Kenneth Harris said: “Everything we do, and every decision we make arises from the interactions of millions of neurons spread across our brains.
“In the past, individual neuroscience labs, working largely in isolation, have focused on understanding the fine details of how single parts of the brain work. But to understand how the brain makes decisions, we have to find out how all these regions work together.
“This is too big of a task for any single lab. By teaming up, we aim to understand large-scale brain activity in fine detail.”
Professor Alexandre Pouget, from the University of Geneva, Switzerland, added: “The current lack of standardisation and data sharing in systems neuroscience makes it extremely difficult to integrate data across laboratories and experiments.”
Dr Andrew Welchman, from Wellcome, said: “The International Brain Lab will deploy state of the art technologies in a collaborative setting, with input from some of the leading experimental and theoretical neuroscientists on the planet. This could be transformative in helping us understand how the brain works.”
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