Excuse me? That has to be a misprint! Even with super-hyperinflation, how is it possible that a thought that used to cost a penny just a few years ago now is supposed to cost a billion dollars?

Admittedly, the comparison is not quite fair. The random thought to be divulged at an unexpected point in time probably was not worth all that much. Maybe more than a penny, but certainly not hundreds of millions of dollars or more! By contrast, the billion offered today is really awarded for answers to a fundamental question of being human: how intelligent thoughts are formed, stored, and recalled. Many governmental funding agencies around the world are offering substantial amounts of research funds to figure out how our brain works. In the US alone, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Education, and various other public and private foundations have been supporting a wide spectrum of research topics in neuroscience for a long time. In addition to these ongoing programs, the US government announced in 2013 the launch of a brand new $100 million initiative with the goal of mapping the connections among the neurons in human and animal brains. The project is fittingly called BRAIN, or Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies, and has the ambitious goal of reconstructing the activities of individual neurons and their firing patterns in brain circuits. Specifically, the BRAIN initiative is being challenged to create new technologies that can simultaneously record the activity patterns of millions of neurons with a time resolution corresponding to actual mental processes. The expectation – or at least the hope – is that an understanding of these patterns will reveal how we create and manage thoughts and memories, what cognition is, how we learn and make inferences, and how molecular perturbations can lead to changes in behavior. A better understanding might also suggest how to intervene if the brain goes awry due to accidents or degenerative disease. In similar strategic efforts, the European Union plans to spend over a billion euros on simulations that explain brain circuits on the basis of neurotransmitter molecules and their dynamics, and several institutes for research in neuroscience have sprung up in Asia during the past two decades. So, the $1 billion in the heading of this chapter is really a vast underestimate.