We hypothesize that the brain “secrets” constitute a moderate number (n < 100) of system principles at all levels of brain construction – from biomolecular structures up to the higher nervous activity (the latter term for mind functions was used by I.P. Pavlov (1849-1936)). We believe that now an unbiased search (by a specialized team of 21 intensely cooperating explorers) of these principles (many of them are already known) and their live implementations might yield a complete human brain wiring diagram with its full functional description in less than five years. Of course, the teamers should be highly motivated in the subject of the search and well-equipped with modern high-tech research tools and knowledge with the background in physics and informatics. The successful solution of the stated above problems will further enable artificial brain creation. With these ideas, we are starting the Russian project in brain reverse engineering, which is planned to run on full swing at the end of 2012.

Our hopes for success are based on great achievements of several past decades in all branches of neuroscience, and the experience of previous works, which will be summarized in the talk. In particular, we will deal with data formats in neural channels (frequency and ensemble codes, stochastic resonance, synchronous/asynchronous modes of multineuronal activity, stochastic (Marr-Hopfield) and continuous (bump) attractor networks and different types of spike-time dependent plasticity. We are also planning to integrate into our operation many parts of the much underappreciated legacy of David Marr (1946-1980) in understanding cortical neural networks as well as all available relevant theoretical and experimental results of the recent years.