Neuroscience awaits a similar breakthrough. We know that there must be some lawful relation between assemblies of neurons and the elements of thought, but we are currently at a loss to describe those laws. We don’t know, for example, whether our memories for individual words inhere in individual neurons or in sets of neurons, or in what way sets of neurons might underwrite our memories for words, if in fact they do. The problem with both of the big brain projects is that too few of the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent are devoted to spanning this conceptual chasm. Both projects are making important contributions: the European effort is helping build infrastructure for data integration; the American project is emphasizing the development of state-of-the-art tools for collecting new kinds of data. But as anyone in a field richer in data than theory (like weather forecasting) can tell you, amassing data is only a start. The success of both the Human Brain Project and the Brain Initiative will ultimately rest not just on the data to be collected but also on what can be done with those data once they are collected. On that, too little has been said.Being able to simply identify how the physical neuron -- and its attendant neurotransmitters -- act to make or store memories is a foundational first step. And we're really still struggling with that. It's akin to physicists not knowing what the atom is, but trying to amass tons of data mapping how many atoms there are in an object and what their bonds and locations are. The case of HM and others have pointed out which structures in the brain are integral in memory formation, but that's like saying you know that there's an engine under the hood integral in locomotion. You have to understand all of the parts of the structure, and how they work and interact.
With a more optimistic tone, the article Probing Brain's Depth, Trying to Aid Memory points out that real-time brain recording has a useful role in helping doctors to treat many neurological injuries and diseases, especially seizures and TBI. The approach is to use probes to measure the activity involved in seizures / TBI and try to induce electrical stimulation to manage them.
