On Monday, the National Institutes of Health released a fifty-eight-page report on the future of neuroscience—the first substantive step in developing President Obama’s BRAIN Initiative, which seeks to “revolutionize our understanding of the human mind and uncover new ways to treat, prevent, and cure brain disorders like Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, autism, epilepsy, and traumatic brain injury.” Assembled by an advisory panel of fifteen scientists led by Cori Bargmann, of Rockefeller University, and William Newsome, of Stanford, the report assesses the state of neuroscience and offers a vision for the field’s future.

The core challenge, as the report puts it, is simply that “brains—even small ones—are dauntingly complex”:

Information flows in parallel through many different circuits at once; different components of a single functional circuit may be distributed across many brain structures and be spatially intermixed with the components of other circuits; feedback signals from higher levels constantly modulate the activity within any given circuit; and neuromodulatory chemicals can rapidly alter the effective wiring of any circuit.

To tackle the brain’s immense complexity, the report outlines nine goals for the initiative. No effort to study the brain is likely to succeed without devoting serious attention to all nine, which range from creating structural maps of its static, physical connections to developing new ways of recording continuous, dynamic activity as it perceives the world and directs action. A less flashy, equally critical goal is to create a “census” of the brain’s basic cell types, which neuroscientists haven’t yet established. (The committee also devotes attention to ethical questions that could arise, such as what should happen if neural enhancement—the use of engineering to alter the brain—becomes a realistic possibility.)

The most important goal, in my view, is buried in the middle of the list at No. 5, which seeks to link human behavior with the activity of neurons. This is more daunting than it seems: scientists have yet to even figure out how the relatively simple, three-hundred-and-two-neuron circuitry of the C. Elegans worm works, in part because there are so many possible interactions that can take place between sets of neurons. A human brain, by contrast, contains approximately eighty-six billion neurons.

To progress, we need to learn how to combine the insights of molecular biochemistry, which has come to dominate the lowest reaches of neuroscience, with the study of computation and cognition, which have moved to the forefront of fields such as cognitive psychology. (Though some dream of eliminating psychology from the discussion altogether, no neuroscientist has ever shown that we can understand the mind without psychology and cognitive science.) The key, emphasized in the report, is interdisciplinary work shared as openly as possible: “The most exciting approaches will bridge fields, linking experiment to theory, biology to engineering, tool development to experimental application, human neuroscience to non-human models, and more.”

Perhaps the least compelling aspect of the report is one of its justifications for why we should invest in neuroscience in the first place: “The BRAIN Initiative is likely to have practical economic benefits in the areas of artificial intelligence and ‘smart’ machines.” This seems unrealistic in the short- and perhaps even medium-term: we still know too little about the brain’s logical processes to mine them for intelligent machines. At least for now, advances in artificial intelligence tend to come from computer science (driven by its longstanding interest in practical tools for efficient information processing), and occasionally from psychology and linguistics (for their insights into the dynamics of thought and language). Only rarely do advances come from neuroscience. That may change someday, but it could take decades.

It would have been useful for the report to include more discussion of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, which has its own half-billion-dollar budget for neuroscience, provided by its founder, Paul Allen. Whereas the BRAIN Initiative is still only a proposal, the A.I.B.S. has, for the past decade, been building brain maps and sharing them freely. Because its recent proposal for a series of “brain observatories,” described last year in Nature, presaged Obama’s BRAIN Initiative in many ways, it arguably deserves more comment and analysis. (Full disclosure: I’m speaking at the Institute next week.)

But these are quibbles. There are plenty of reasons to invest in basic neuroscience, even if it takes decades for the field to produce significant advances in artificial intelligence. If the projects outlined in the new report deliver half of what they intend, they will revolutionize both science and medicine by giving us the first clear understanding of the circuits that underlie brain function. With those discoveries, we may see the first major advances in decades in the treatment of mental illnesses and brain injuries. More than that, we stand an excellent chance of gaining a significantly richer understanding of ourselves.

Gary Marcus is a professor of psychology at N.Y.U., the author of “Guitar Zero,” and a co-editor of the forthcoming book “The Future of The Brain: Essays by the World’s Leading Neuroscientists.”

Illustration by Nishant Choksi.