There’s been some angst among fellow scientists about the use of the above term to describe the current attempts to use experimentation and computational neuroscience together particularly in the context of robotics. The worry is that if we can’t reverse engineer the worm C. elegans or the sea snail, Aplysia–which we can’t at present–then we certainly aren’t in a position to reverse engineer the aspects of higher cognition (e.g. spatial navigation) that are interesting about mammalian brains–especially our own.
I agree with the worriers in that, the prospects of building a robot with fully human-like capabilities is not in the near future. Where I disagree is with the notion of setting a scientific agenda that uses the principles of reverse engineering to build up (incrementally) an understanding of how aspects of higher cognition emerge from neuronal activity. An example of very productive work in this field can be seen in the research coming out of Gerry Edelman’s Neuroscience Institute in La Jolla where computational neuroscience models interact with the real noisy environment. Jeff Krichmar’s work there (he’s now at UC Irvine) is an excellent example of this approach.
And so, when the idea of reverse engineering the brain comes up, from my perspective it is as a metaphor. As far as actual reverse engineering of brains, this will happen in the worm or the fly long before it becomes an actual possibility for vertebrate brains. But the term is a useful metaphor for an approach, whereby experimentally determined characteristics of real brains can be applied to real life engineering problems–like creating better autonomous vehicles.
Jim
Discoverers and Discoveries 