Want to see a human brain sliced open? Wired magazine has the gory photos as well as an in-depth profile of Paul Allen's Allen Institute for Brain Science, an ambitious scientific undertaking that's attempting to map thousands of genes that make up the human brain.

"I first got interested in the brain through computers," Allen tells Wired. "There's a long history of artificial intelligence programs that try to mimic what the brain is doing, but they've all fallen short. Here's this incredible computer, a really astonishing piece of engineering, and we have no idea how it works."

Wired's Jonah Lehrer writes that there's some irony in Allen efforts to fund "an exhaustive atlas of our neural hardware":

For decades, many cognitive scientists insisted that the physical brain was largely irrelevant to the study of the mind. It didn't matter whether the human operating system was running on a real cortex or a set of silicon microchips—the software was everything.

Given Allen's background—this was the man who helped develop MS-DOS 1.0, after all—he might have been expected to ally with the software crowd in the belief that the 1s and 0s were more important than the anatomical details. Instead, Allen decided that our operating system could run only on one very particular kind of computer. "There are so many intricacies to our brain that won't be understood unless we start to look at the system as a whole," he says. "All these different details don't operate in isolation. But how do they work together to create such a powerful machine?"

A good read.