Decade of the Mind

The Decade of the Mind Project is an international initiative to advance scientific understanding of how the mind and complex behaviors are related to the activity of human brains. The problem of explaining the mind is so complex as to require "big science" to make real progress. The effort stemmed from concerns in the scientific community that mind research (as opposed to simply brain research) had received inadequate support relative to its importance in human lives. The Project began with a conference of leading US scientists at George Mason University in May 2007 which led to The Decade of the Mind Manifesto, published as a letter to the editor in Science. The Manifesto called for a new $4B US investment in research across the many disciplines of mind research over the decade from 2012 to 2022. Since the May 2007 meeting, the Decade of the Mind Project has held several other conferences across the United States and is now being internationalized with a conference in Berlin, Germany, in September 2009 and a conference planned for Singapore in October 2010.

During the 1990s US President George Herbert Walker Bush declared a decade of research to center on neuroscience. The resulting Decade of the Brain was a well publicized inter-US agency initiative that responded to the declaration. The two lead federal agencies in that initiative were the Library of Congress and the National Institute of Mental Health (part of the larger National Institutes of Health). Although the initiative did not receive the level of funding as the Human Genome Project, it did serve to catalyze significant advances in our understanding of the brain particularly in the context of brain diseases. The Decade of the Brain project was followed in 2001 by a Decade of Behavior Project that also attempted to bring together scientists, this time to understand how human behavior emerges.

More recent advances in brain research, in combination with the scientific consensus that mind indeed emerges as a result of the activities of the brain, has led to the notion of a new "Decade" project, one dedicated to understanding the phenomenon of mind within the context of neuroscience and psychology. In May 2007, a group of scientists met at George Mason University's Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study to map out a roadmap for the Initiative. The starting point was the earlier Decade of the Brain project [1][2]. The Decade of the Mind project seeks as much as $4 billion in federal support over the course of the ten-year-long initiative. The goal is to use the new federal support to jump start advances in our scientific understanding of mind as well as to use that same research to serve as an economic engine for the United States. From an international perspective, the Decade of the Mind project seeks to involve scientists from across the globe in this effort, not only to improve the public health, but also to create new jobs from the new technologies developed under the Project.

...
Wikipedia