Scientist receives grant to create brain database

Michael Jones, a cognitive scientist at IU, has received $2.5 million from the National Institute of Mental Health along with his colleagues at the University of Colorado, University of Texas and Washington University in St. Louis.

They will use the money to establish an automated system for large-scale synthesis of human neuroimaging data called NeuroSynth.org.

“There is a vast amount of so-called ‘unrealized knowledge’ across a number of scientific sources — yet-to-be discovered information that is not located in any specific article but is rather distributed across many,” Jones said in a press release.

The site will bring together information from thousands of articles.

According to a press release, the online platform is like a “Google of the brain.”

In recent years, human neuroimaging has led to major advances in the field of study, but the volume of images available often makes finding specific information difficult to find, according to a press release.

The new platform will allow users to more effectively search information from a wide spectrum of bodies of work and experiments.

“Scientists are regularly reading distinct but related articles to make these discoveries, and NeuroSynth will attempt to simulate and scale up this knowledge discovery process, generating novel hypotheses to test with future experiments,” Jones said.

— Sydney Murray