Understanding, healing, and recreating the brain

What is love? Or joy, or sadness? These and other powerful feelings, which can shake us like ships tossed at sea, stem from the intricate activity among nerve cells.

How do we guide our hand to a cookie at the center of a dish? How do toddlers manage to learn their mother tongue - and several other languages? Could these complex actions, and many others, be governed by fixed codes? Hundreds of scientists around the world are joining forces to find the answers to such questions.

With the new century only a matter of months away, the Weizmann Institute is launching a task force in an effort to uncover and disclose the most basic, predetermined activity code of the brain. Participating in this specialized research group are neurobiologists, mathematicians, computer scientists, physicists, and chemists, working at the Norman and Helen Asher Center for Brain Imaging and the Arison Laboratory for Human Brain Imaging.Thanks to this combination of disciplines, Institute scientists are making a vital contribution to the worldwide effort to study the brain. At their disposal is an immensely powerful combination of advanced technologies, some of which were invented and developed by Institute scientists.

Understanding the brain may yield advanced healing methods, including sensory replacement. Application of the brain's mode of operation may bring forth computers and robots able to communicate independently with and adapt to their ever-changing environment. Medicine and industry will be unrecognizably transformed. One day in the third millennium, when the brain's code - or codes - are discovered and deciphered, the Weizmann Institute will be remembered as a prime mover in this field.