A couple of years ago, the European Union and Barack Obama announced the creation of two macro projects designed to decipher how the brain works, investing billions in the coming decades. There has never been such a large investment in research on human beings. The effort to decipher this great mystery, as Obama himself said, will transform humanity.

Scientists dedicated to the study of the nervous system are no doubt excited about this interest— and the accompanying investment— that these two initiatives represent. The American proposal, which has just received new investment, focuses on developing new techniques to observe the functioning of the brain in action. The idea is to develop and validate methods during the first six years and then to apply them within the following six years.

The European version, called the Human Brain Project, aims to be the neuroscience version of the Human Genome Project, which aroused much interest when it came out. The project plan highlights ten key objectives, most of which are directed toward the formidable goal of achieving a computer simulation of the brain in order to better understand it and find how to best treat mental illness. Both projects recognize the need to join forces and boast a high degree of interdisciplinary with geneticists, chemists, engineers, doctors, experts in information science, etc. in the same room discussing the best experimental approach and interpretation of the results.

This panorama is exciting, especially if one contemplates the possibilities of recently developed techniques, such as stimulating or inhibiting neurons with a ray of light (optogenetics), making the brain transparent in order to better observe neurons with dye (clarity), staining each different kind of neuron a different color (Brainbow), and so on. However, something is missing: it seems that within fifteen years we will know the brain much better, but we will still know little of the mind. Scientists take different positions on the relationship between the mind and brain, but it seems reasonable that neuroscience research should largely include both. But do the American and European initiatives include both?

The interdisciplinary efforts present in these large projects seem to forget something. Obama's Brain Initiative is explained in a document of nearly one hundred and fifty pages. It mentions the word "psychology" six times, however, not in the context of areas where money will be spent; the word "mind," beyond expressions like "you have to keep in mind," appears once in the first lines of the preamble. The word "philosophy" is also found once in the title, "The brain initiative: vision and philosophy." Most people today understand that the mind and brain go together, as well as that psychology and broad fields of philosophy (e.g., philosophy of the mind, action, science, epistemology, ethics, and so on) are appropriate disciplines for trying to understand the human mind. The European project seems to attempt to make up for this lacking with the creation of the European Institute for Theoretical Neuroscience, although a quick look at its scientific program makes it clear that it is of an engineering and computational nature within this theoretical approach.

I insist that these two projects are of great interest for neuroscience and society as a whole, and that in a few years both will benefit from its fruits. But, as with the Human Genome Project on which it is based and which currently seems to be sinking in the waters of epigenetics, this project will leave more questions than answers if its directors do not accept a truly interdisciplinary approach to solving the problems it goes up against.

How neuroscience sometimes depends on other sources of knowledge, complementary and even common areas, should be an on object of reflection for the neuroscientist himself. Do we want to find easy answers to questions we already have or face the great enigmas of human life with a collaborative spirit?

It seems that sometimes neuroscientists lack nerve in the face of the immense questions that our discipline poses and opt to try to minimize these questions in order to fully answer them using our experiments. The following example suffices to illustrate this problem: a little over a year ago, one of the most respected researchers in this country said in an interview that concepts like guilt are very unscientific, and therefore must be revised. It might be so, but it all depends on how far away the scientist wants to sit from mankind's greatest problems.