ABOUT DECADE OF THE MIND
During the 1990s U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush declared a decade of research to center on neuroscience. The resulting Decade of the Brain was a well publicized inter-US agency initiative that responded to the declaration. The two lead federal agencies in that initiative were the Library of Congress and the National Institute of Mental Health (part of the larger National Institutes of Health). Although the initiative did not receive the level of funding as its sister Human Genome Project, it did serve to catalyze significant advances in our understanding of the brain particularly in the context of brain diseases.
Recent advances in brain research, in combination with the scientific consensus that mind emerges as a result of the activities of brains, has led to the notion of a new "Decade" project — one dedicated to understanding the phenomenon of mind within the context of neuroscience. In May 2007 a group of leading scientists met at George Mason University's Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study to map out what such a national initiative might look like.
The Decade of the Mind initiative is trans-disciplinary and multi-agency in its approach. Success will require research that reaches across many disciplines.
The Decade of the Mind initiative focuses on four broad areas:
- Healing and protecting the mind: This is the notion of improving the public health by curing diseases of the brain that affect the mind. An example of such a disease is Alzheimer’s disease.
- Understanding the mind: This aspect of the initiative seeks to understand how mind actually emerges from brain functional activity. Some of the key characteristics of the mind that are still not understood include consciousness, memory and dreams.
- Enriching the mind: Improving learning outcomes in education is a key component of this part of the initiative.
- Modeling the mind: A key approach to understanding the mind is to model it either analytically or using computation. Such models of mind may facilitate the creation of new hypotheses which can then be tested in the laboratory or clinic. Modeling the mind may also allow for the creation of new applications, technologies and inventions.
The Albuquerque event is the fourth in a series of Decade of the Mind conferences.
Decade of the Mind on Wikipedia