According to The New York Times, the US government “signed off last year on a request by the National Institutes of Health for $4.5 billion to deliver a ‘comprehensive, mechanistic understanding of mental function’ by 2025. Private foundations in the US, like the Allen Institute for Brain Science and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, have also announced major investments in basic brain research in recent years. And this summer, the blue-sky research arm of the US intelligence agencies, Iarpa, distributed some $50 million in five-year grants to map the [connections] in a *cubic millimeter of mouse brain linked to learning behavior, record the corresponding neurons in live mouse brains and simulate the circuits in a computer.”21st