Today our technology improves at the speed of Moore’s Law, and those who study that exponential growth, like Ray Kurzweil, contend that we will not only map the brain in our lifetime, but are only a decade away from doing so.

Such ambitious claims are certain to give a neuroscientist the same knee jerk reaction that life scientists had when similar early claims were made about sequencing human genomes.

Five years into the Human Genome Project, it was considered a failure since scientists had completed only 1% of the sequence. Somehow five years after that it was finished. That’s because early on, scientists were required to sequence the genome in linear order. […]