TY - JOUR T1 - <em>In Silico</em>: Where Next? JF - eneuro JO - eNeuro DO - 10.1523/ENEURO.0131-21.2021 VL - 8 IS - 2 SP - ENEURO.0131-21.2021 AU - Adrienne L. Fairhall Y1 - 2021/03/01 UR - http://www.eneuro.org/content/8/2/ENEURO.0131-21.2021.abstract N2 - Everyone agrees that we do not yet understand how brains work, neither well enough to satisfactorily explain basic functions such as memory nor to design effective interventions to restore mental health. This is one of the great scientific challenges of our era, with huge implications not only for human health but for insight into all animal life and for the development of future technologies. How should resources be invested to foster the necessary leap toward understanding? Given the pressing societal need and the very high public expectations of neuroscience, stoked by TED talks, New York Times articles, and sci fi, the pressures riding on choices of funding targets are enormous.Against this background, 2013 was a banner year for the brain: both the European Union and the United States agreed to devote unprecedented support specifically to neuroscience. The European Union funded the billion-dollar Human Brain Project (HBP; Amunts et al, 2016), whose centerpiece was a team science effort to develop neuroinformatics infrastructure and to expand the Blue Brain Project (Markram, 2006), a high-fidelity biophysically realistic computational model of brain tissue. In the United States, the BRAIN Initiative launched with an initial commitment of $100 million and the appointment of a panel of respected scientists who met over months to identify major gaps and promising directions in neuroscience (Jorgenson et al., 2015). Government agencies then formulated funding opportunities that supported individual labs or small teams to develop new technologies to record, stimulate, analyze, and interpret neural activity. These efforts stimulated brain initiatives in several other countries, including Japan, Korea, and China (Huang and Luo, 2015; Grillner et al., 2016). Almost 10 years later, it is timely to look back at some of the large-scale neuroscience efforts of the past decade and the routes they … ER -