A National Institutes of Health working group of scientists including John Donoghue, professor of neuroscience and engineering at Brown, has posted a report of its vision for the federal Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) initiative. The report calls for a 10-year research program, funded with $4.5 billion, to accelerate the development of technologies and theory to help understand how the brain’s complex neural circuitry produces cognition, emotion, perception, and action in health and disease. “The most important outcome of the BRAIN Initiative will be a comprehensive, mechanistic understanding of mental function that emerges from synergistic application of the new technologies and conceptual structures developed under the BRAIN Initiative,” the authors wrote. During a meeting Thursday, June 5, 2014, of his advisory council, NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins endorsed the report. “I am excited about the bold vision laid out for BRAIN by this distinguished group of scientists and have accepted the recommendations in their entirety,” Collins wrote in a statement.