President Obama recently announced his commitment to a new project, the “Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies,” or “BRAIN” initiative. This initiative will fund and further research being done to understand the brain and neurological conditions like Alzheimer’s disease, autism and epilepsy. It will involve the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the National Science Foundation (NSF), as well as partnerships with the private sector.
Researchers at universities around the country will work interconnectedly to understand how the billions of individual cells in the human brain interact. At UF, engineers in the J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering have already been working towards this effort for years. Mingzhou Ding, a professor of biomedical engineering, and Xiaotong Wen, an assistant research scientist of biomedical engineering, have been studying the different neurological networks that are involved in our ability to concentrate.
Read more about their work: http://news.ufl.edu/archive/2013/04/uf-researchers-show-brains-battle-for-attention.php