It’s one of nature’s greatest ironies: the human brain lacks the ability to grasp its own complexity. 

The three-pound organ housed in our heads consists of roughly 86 billion neurons. Each neuron connects to 10,000 other neurons, creating a seemingly infinite array of synaptic connections—estimated in the ballpark of 100 trillion—that make us who we are as individuals. 

Despite gains made by neuroscientists in uncovering the brain’s intricacies, much remains unknown, from the precise mechanisms involved in memory formation to the role of genes in brain development. 

Today, however, advancements in neural probes, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are “revolutionizing our understanding of the brain and making it possible to probe brain function in ways we never thought possible before,” says Johns Hopkins neuroscientist Richard L. Huganir. 

That’s why Huganir and his colleague Patricia Janak, a biological psychologist, teamed up to launch OneNeuro, an initiative that brings together researchers and practitioners from across the university to help decode the complicated control center between our ears. 

“Our goal is to stop at nothing short of a complete understanding of the brain, from the molecular level to the cognitive and behavioral levels,” says Huganir, a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor who directs the Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and is also a professor in the Krieger School’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. “It won’t happen overnight, but it can happen over time with the right people, technologies, and organizational systems.” 

Specifically, the work requires a focus on basic research with “cross-disciplinary expertise and unprecedented collaboration among neuroscientists, engineers, computer scientists, data scientists, neurologists, neurosurgeons, psychiatrists, cognitive scientists, psychologists, philosophers, and others,” says Janak, a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor with appointments in JHU’s School of Medicine and Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. 

Right now, more than 1,000 faculty members, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate and undergraduate students at Johns Hopkins pursue neuroscience-related research, whether at the molecular, cellular, systems, behavioral, computational, or clinical level. Neuroscience and biomedical engineering are two of the five most popular majors for Hopkins undergraduates. 

The new brain initiative builds on the promise of the Johns Hopkins Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute that launched in 2016 to foster partnerships among neuroscientists, engineers, and data scientists working on the brain and behavior. OneNeuro expands the collaboration to take advantage of the university’s deep expertise and resources in brain-related medical care and mental health services—and data-driven discovery through the recently launched Johns Hopkins Data Science and AI Institute. 

“The brain is one of the last major frontiers in biology,” Janak says. “It’s a mystery and a great challenge for the future, given that effective therapies and treatments for many brain disorders—both neurological and psychiatric—do not currently exist.” 

Advancements in technology are key to making progress, Janak and Huganir contend. For instance, in vivo neural probes developed in the last decade enable scientists to measure brain activity far more precisely—and in much greater volume—than ever before. But the data sets retrieved by these probes “are too big for humans to analyze without help from data science and AI,” Janak says. 

In Janak’s lab, neuroscientists use a tiny neural probe implanted in rat brains to investigate the behavioral and neural mechanisms of addiction. “These probes are a major advance for understanding brain function, including things like learning, memory, and addiction,” Janak explains. “They make it possible to record data from hundreds to thousands of neurons at the same time in awake, behaving animals.” 

Janak and her team use the probes to look at “neural activity in brain areas known to be important in drug craving, with a goal of pinpointing what happens as animals transition in and out of a state of high motivation for a drug,” she says. The neural recordings result in a treasure trove of information, with “tons of data streaming in every second as animals move, think, feel, and react to stimuli in the environment.” 

But making sense of the large, complex datasets doesn’t fall within the wheelhouse of many neuroscientists. “It requires expertise from computer programmers, statisticians, data scientists, and AI specialists,” Janak says. “Ultimately, this is the purpose of OneNeuro—to foster and coordinate collaboration in areas needed to do the work of advancing human knowledge of the brain.”