Last week, the Human Connectome Project, supported jointly by
sixteen components of the National Institutes of Health,
released its first set of data, a massive set of structural and
functional images of the brains of sixty-eight adult
volunteers—to almost no fanfare whatsoever. The amount of data,
two terabytes, is so great that it poses problems for the
Internet; you can download it for free if you like, but the
organizers of the project would rather mail it to you on a hard
drive. The announcement has received so little press so far
because nobody has yet figured what to do with all the data. In
principle, data of this sort might contribute to understanding
how the brain works, and might have important implications for
treating neurological disease—especially when the project is
complete, and the researchers have scanned all one thousand two
hundred subjects. But, for now, we know how much data has been
collected, but not what it all means. If I were in the Obama
Administration, I would be worried. Accordi