Our aim is to establish an Australian Brain Initiative that will generate and harness new knowledge and discovery, enabling us to understand how to both build and protect the brain. An integral part will be establshing a supportive sustainable pathway for our brain scientists in Australia. Through this we will create advanced industries in neurotechnology, develop treatments for debilitating brain disorders, and produce high-impact transdisciplinary collaborations that will increase our understanding of the brain.
Understanding the human brain is one of the greatest challenges of our time and we are on the cusp of a revolution in brain sciences.
Accelerated advances in neuroscience and technology is allowing researchers to understand, modify and interface with the brain in unprecedented ways; enabling the treatment of devastating brain disorders, enrich education and learning, and facilitate the development of neuroscience and technological industries.
Other international brain initiatives are tackling the fundamental and momentus challenge of mapping the trillions of connections in the brain. To complement this effort, Australia has an opportunity to focus on understanding brain function; cracking the brain’s code through cutting-edge research, new partnerships between academia and industry and the translation of this new knowledge to schools, hospitals and Australian workplaces. Education and training will drive discovery and application.
Just an example – Australia also leads the world in neuroprosthetics – the technology that links the brain to devices. We are now in a position to lead revolutionary high-tech industries based on neurotechnology.
New brain-machine interfaces as well as stimulating and recording devices are using information about the brain to produce smarter, implantable and wearable devices that can relieve pain, restore sensory and motor function, treat debilitating brain disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and drive genuine progress for the delivery of highly personalised mental health care.
The Australian Brain Initiative will:
Our brains are impossibly complex biological machines.
Brain science is the ongoing endeavour to understand the trillions of connections and linkages of the billions of neurons within the brain. We have made enormous progress through the years in imaging, recording and stimulating brain activity, so as to understand its function and how it controls our thoughts, movements, our very lives.
But it’s just the tip of the iceberg.
As the world enters a new era of brain research, it is clear that a comprehensive understanding of something as complex as the human brain will require the coordinated effort of people working in a wide variety of fields, from physics, mathematics, computing, robotics and engineering to biology, genetics, medicine and psychology.
An integrated transdisciplinary approach is required to provide revolutionary solutions to some of the most difficult problems of our time. The Australian Brain Alliance’s plan is built on three main principles to transform Australia’s brain research capabilities and ensure ow-ons to Australian high-tech industries.
1) high-impact, transdisciplinary collaborations.
2) research funding that doesn’t di erentiate between medical and basic research.
3) advancing Australia through neuroinnovation.
Currently, Australian brain science comprises eminent, world leaders in human cognitive neuroscience as well as the biology, physiology and genetics of the nervous system. We also boast excellent capability in brain imaging and mathematical neuroscience, and a history of success in neurotechnology development and translation such as “Cochlear”, an exemplar of the kind of neurotechnology success stories we envisage will be born out of high impact transdisciplinary collaborations in brain science.
Australia has demonstrated world leading excellence in neuroscience research and neurotechnologies.
The Australian Brain Alliance offers a new vision for brain research and brain-inspired technology development in Australia that will revolutionise how we live and work; and will alleviate the human suffering of mental illness, neurological disease, brain and nervous system injury or degeneration, and intellectual disabilities.
Australia needs rapid technology transfer, and a consistent pipeline of discoveries that underpin the most compelling therapeutics and the most enduring technologies for the benefit of Australians.
As we improve our understanding of the brain, we can develop ways to stimulate, mimic and augment its functions.
These neurotechnology approaches encompass tools that can map and image the brain with high precision and resolution, instruments to read and monitor brain activity, devices to tweak the signals firing between neurons, to develop techniques that can help with injuries or integrate prosthetics, or to enhance brain function.
Neurostimulation is when brain activity is artificially perturbed or stimulated. The methods can be invasive or non-invasive and allow for brain activity to be enhanced or inhibited so researchers can explore the links between specific types of brain activity and function.
Just as our brains are the ultimate processors, they also possess the ultimate hardware, capable of storing and processing information in parallel. Research is ongoing into developing ways to build computer chips that mimic the structures and processes of the brain so as to realise unprecedented leaps in both memory storage and processing power.
Our brains are the ultimate processors. Huge progress has been made in developing computing algorithms based upon our understanding of how the brain works. Deep learning is a form of machine learning inspired by the layered, hierarchical structure of neural connections in the human visual system.
The strength of the connections between the artificial ‘neurons’ are gradually adjusted through exposure to different example inputs—they become stronger when the network correctly identifies or classifies the input. Reinforcement learning is a set of algorithms that can learn sequences of actions that maximise a reward. These were inspired by research into animal behaviour and mimic the role dopamine plays in the brain.