Spitzer and his team are trying to figure out what’s going on in the rest of those neurons, or brain cells – specifically, what "jobs" they have in the body. But first, a bit of Neuroscience 101:

“As your readers may know, the nerve cells or neurons in the brain communicate with each other through the release of chemicals, called neurotransmitters,” Spitzer said. “This allows a motor neuron that makes a muscle contract signal to the muscle to say, ‘time to contract.’ It seems like kind of a clumsy way to organize a signaling system.”

But sometimes, those neurons change "jobs" – a motor neuron might start signaling another function in the body, for example.

“We thought for a long time that the wiring of the brain was a little bit like the wiring of some sort of electronic device in that the connection of the wires in the ‘device,’ the brain, are fairly fixed. What we’re finding is that the wires can remain in place, but the function of the circuit and the connection of the wires can change,” Spitzer said. “This is something of a heresy.”

What’s next for neuroscience? “The elephant in the room is developing a theory of the mind,” said Spitzer. “Neuroscientists are proud of what they’ve learned, but if you’re a little tough-minded, you might say, ‘Do we actually have a theory of the way in which cognition works, imagination works, creativity operates?’ The answer, fundamentally, is ‘no.’

“These issues have their antecedents, their origins, in the Greek philosophers and the Roman philosophers and undoubtedly the Chinese philosophers who wanted very much to try to understand these issues.”

‘Mapping’ the brain to fight Alzheimer’s and psychiatric illness

Ralph Greenspan, director of the newly created Center for Brain Activity Mapping at the University of California, San Diego, wants to make a "map" of all the electrical signals that happen in the brain. Starting with fruit flies, his team is using new technology to get an in-depth look at how neurons communicate with one another – think MRI, but in a much higher resolution. Their goal? “To be able to see, in a comprehensive way, what the activities and patterns of the brain are that underlie the most interesting things that we do as humans,” Greenspan said. “These are the things that intrigue us, that go wrong.”

In the past, scientists have often narrowly focused their research on pinpointing specific functions, but Greenspan is looking for “a global perspective of what goes on.”

In the long-term, he thinks this will be particularly important for certain kinds of mental illness. “For diseases like autism and schizophrenia, it is now becoming widely accepted that these are diseases of brain-wide connections. It’s not going to be possible to arrest Alzheimer’s effectively or cure psychiatric illness unless we know what’s actually wrong in the brain.”