The first phase of the national brain mapping laboratory will be inaugurated by mid-February, said Kamal Kharrazi, president of the board of trustees at the Institute for Cognitive Science Studies.
“The construction process is drawing to a close, and the first phase will be equipped with facilities worth $4 million by mid-February,” he said, as reported by ICTPRESS.
A consortium of academic centers and research institutes, the center is affiliated to the Ministry of Science and Technology, and supported by the Vice-Presidency for Science and Technology. The board of trustees will include Health Minister Hassan Qazizadeh Hashemi and Vice-President for Science and Technology Sourena Sattari.
It will help meet the country’s needs in terms of research and technology for brain mapping techniques, offer knowledge-based services and produce up-to-the-minute information in the field of cognitive science.
Based on the campus of Tehran University of Medical Sciences, the institute will be administrated by a board of trustees.
Brain mapping is a set of neuroscience techniques predicated on the mapping of (biological) quantities or properties onto spatial representations of the (human or non-human) brain resulting in maps. It basically gives a thorough picture of the brain’s structure just like Google Earth shows satellite images of the planet.
It attempts to relate the brain’s structure to its function, or finding what parts give us certain abilities. It also examines how our environment changes our brain’s structure by studying, for instance, how the brain changes physically through the learning and aging processes.
Brain mapping also examines what goes wrong physically in the brain during mental illnesses and other brain diseases. “Once the center is fully operational, it could go a long way in screening and detecting cognitive disorders in children early, which will make treatment easier since children’s brain is much more flexible than adults,” said Kharrazi, a former foreign minister.
