If there is one area of research where there should be little to no funding cuts, it should be neuroscience. Neuroscience is focused on the nervous system, with the brain as the prime. There is no human life without the brain. Any problem with the brain could become a problem for life.
There are several disorders of the brain where understanding of how the brain works could become pivotal in management or treatment. Neuroscience research has had several successes, but the ultimate success would be how the brain works for all the functions that are ascribed to it, to place how things may go wrong or to better target attempts at therapy. However, brain research funding has been getting slashed.
The BRAIN Initiative
There is a report [from April, 2024] in The Transmitter, $278 million cut in BRAIN Initiative funding leaves neuroscientists in limbo, stating that, “A key program to support neuroscience research in the United States faces a 40 percent decrease in funding for the current fiscal year. The sizeable cut to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative is a result of the 2024 annual congressional appropriations bill, which was signed into law last month. The bill provides a total of $402 million for the BRAIN Initiative for the current fiscal year, which ends 30 September—a $278 million decrease from the 2023 fiscal year.”
“The BRAIN Initiative was launched in 2013 as a collaboration across 10 federal and non-federal institutes and centers to spur research into the workings of the human brain. Over the past decade, it has funded multiple large-scale projects, some of which are ongoing, including the Brain Initiative Cell Atlas Network, which is pioneering single-cell atlases for the human brain and the mouse brain, and the FlyWire Connectome project, which mapped every neuron in the fruit fly brain and spinal cord.”
How did brain research become a fit for funding cuts? Were the results of the projects not good enough? How far should brain science research have gone to make it evident that it is a no-touch zone for budget cuts?
Mental Health and Neuroscience
A few years ago, one of the biggest news stories was mental health. Several individuals with global name recognition spoke out about mental health, therapy, conditions, challenges, and so on. There were various tips on what to do and what to avoid. Some of these were followed by policy actions including mental health days, breaks, therapy perks, access or expansion to services, and much more.
Stories also emerged of some therapies, with some people saying they benefited and others saying they did not. There were lots of floating labels [7C’s, 5D’s, 4A’s] about mental health that it almost became like they were not referring to the mind.
How did mental health become mainstream, and neuroscience research was nowhere at the center of it? How did conditions about the brain become descriptions that have nothing to do with the brain? The field of psychiatry has the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-5-TR). All with descriptions of conditions, without mentioning what components within the brain are responsible and how, even conceptually.
There is also Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), the standard, which, like diagnosing mental illnesses, is about assessment, observations, surveys, though expanded to discussions and recommendations. How did neuroscience not have a mechanism of how therapy works, such that some works for some people but not for others, or at a time and not—at another time?
Brain Architecture
How come the brain is still described in terms of central executive functions, default mode network, long-term memory, working memory, prediction, mood, emotional state, and so forth? While these descriptions may correspond to what happens within, there should already be architecture for what components in the brain do these and how.
Where to start would be the electrical and chemical signals of neurons, since they are present in all observed functions of the brain. Simply, nothing is as consistent as the signals. And it should also be expressed [at least, conceptually] that signals are not neurons communicating but the basis for functions and the extents of those functions. Neurons are often in clusters. It can be theorized that a reason they are in clusters is so that the signals can assemble as sets or loops, to hold configurations for functions. Also, the signals interact and have states at the time of the interactions to determine the extent of those functions.
Neuroscience Research
Simply, neuroscience research, even with the identification of electrical and chemical signals in all functions, does not have a concept for the signals, as the basis of functions. This could be where neuroscience research stumbled—resulting in the exposure to funding cuts.
Assuming when mental health was in the spotlight, conditions were explained with the interactions and attributes of electrical and chemical signals; it would have, at least, shaped understanding, to an extent, against the opacity. Assuming now that artificial intelligence (AI) is in the spotlight, electrical and chemical signals are used to explain how human intelligence works, it could also have shaped the prominence of neuroscience, as well as with several extra corporate support sources, aside from public funds and nonprofits.
There is a new report from The Transmitter, Neuroscience Ph.D. programs adjust admissions in response to U.S. funding uncertainty, stating that, “The Transmitter reached out to senior leadership and others involved in 50 of the top neuroscience programs in the United States to ask how the shifting funding landscape has affected their admissions process; representatives from 21 programs responded. The heads of nine programs said they are proceeding with the admissions process as usual and plan to admit their typical number of students or close to it.”
“Another eight program leaders told The Transmitter they have reduced the number of students they plan to enroll in their neuroscience departments. The four other respondents described more complex situations, such as paused admissions or concerns about higher acceptance rates than normal. Graduate programs typically extend offers to more students than they can accommodate, with the expectation that only a portion of the prospective students will accept.”
There is another report from The Transmitter, Static pay, shrinking prospects fuel neuroscience postdoc decline, stating that, “The National Science Foundation does not break down postdocs beyond the categories of science and health, but those ranks dwindled from 55,748 to 54,415 in the U.S. between 2012 and 2022—about a 2 percent drop—after decades of growth. In the same time frame, the number of applicants for the NIH’s Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award postdoctoral fellowship dropped from 2,284 to 1,438—down by 37 percent. In 2023, the number of applicants dropped by another 17 percent to just 1,188.”
“Between 1979 and 2022, the number of graduate students in science and health fields in the U.S. more than doubled, from 285,770 to 622,534, and the number of postdocs nearly tripled, from 17,034 to 54,415. The number of junior faculty jobs in the life sciences also grew in the time period, but only from 11,300 in 1981 to 22,400 in 2021. This has left many postdocs in a kind of limbo, languishing for an extra year (or two, or three, or four), hoping to publish the paper that makes them a more competitive applicant for the few available faculty positions.”
For neuroscience research, what is at stake is human life, and for what is already obvious, answers on how the brain works could give new energy to the field. The NIH has the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), National Institute on Aging (NIA) and others, needing a leap forward for their neuroscience research.
This article was written for WHN by David Stephen, who currently does research in conceptual brain science with a focus on the electrical and chemical signals for how they mechanize the human mind with implications for mental health, disorders, neurotechnology, consciousness, learning, artificial intelligence, and nurture. He was a visiting scholar in medical entomology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL. He did computer vision research at Rovira i Virgili University, Tarragona.
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