NIFarious Ideas: Science collects data, the Brain improvises

As an enterprise, science exists to collect objective data from the natural world, a job opportunity afforded to science by the innate fallacies of the human brain, according to Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson in a recent Point of Inquiry interview on Communicating Science. That is, the brain is particularly apt at "discovering" patterns or connections between objects when, in fact, they do not exist. As noted by Dr. Tyson, this ability is very interesting to scientists studying the brain, but can be very troublesome to scientists studying physical properties of the real world.

At the Neuroscience Information Framework, we are taking a stance somewhere in the middle. Our project aims to become the central portal for all things neuroscience on the Web, particularly in regards to data which is hidden below the horizon of traditional Internet search engines. With more than 60 registered data resources and growing, NIF now offers unmatched accessibility to publicly shared neuroscience databases. NIF integrates these resources with semantic web technologies to improve the ability of machines to perform computations across the NIF data federation. However, knowledge discovery is a process in which computers and humans must work together, supplementing each others' abilities or, in this case, fallacies.

Computers or automated agents provide the human user with superior working memory and unbiased information processing. The human brain, on the other hand, has unique abilities to quickly adjust or adapt knowledge with new information. At NIF, we are currently investigating visual analytics platforms and other data views to support this knowledge discovery process. In the end, we seek to provide the most effective ways to organize and present this data to our users such that patterns between data can be discovered and investigated further.

 

---

NIFarious Ideas is a regular weekly column on the NIF Blog that appears every Friday. We seek to highlight the avant-garde, the dangerous, the progressive, the cutting edge in software tools, databasing, ontologies, searching, data collecting and distributing, and of course, neuroscience trends. Join us each Friday -- Be NIFarious!