Map to stroke recovery

The announcement by US President Barack Obama to fund research into mapping the human brain might give me the chance to play my 100th game of AFL for the Pennant Hills Demons.

When I had my stroke in 2005, I was club captain for the mighty Dees, and when I came out of my coma after 4 days, the main motivating force that helped me give everything I had during my rehabilitation was that I had played 96 games for Pennant Hills, and my goal was to work hard enough during my recovery so that I could make an AFL comeback, play 4 more games for Penno and reach my hundredth.

That dream didn't come to reality, but Obama's announcement breaths new life into the possibility of me playing my hundredth game. The proposal, a public/private funding arrangement aims to study the billions of neurons and trillions of connections that make the brain function. If the venture is successful, it will change the lives of people with schizophrenia, Parkinson’s, depression, epilepsy and autism. It will also make prosthetic devices more responsive to human thought, and reverse the effects of stroke.

Scientists see mapping the human brain as something of a "last frontier" in medicine, America's National Institute of Health see this project as something that "will fill major gaps in our current knowledge and provide unprecedented opportunities for exploring exactly how the brain enables the human body to record, process, utilize, store, and retrieve vast quantities of information, all at the speed of thought."

According to President Obama, the "BRAIN Initiative" (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) will unlock the mysteries of the human body's control centre, "As humans, we can identify galaxies light years away. We can study particles smaller than an atom. But we still haven't unlocked the mystery of the three pounds of matter that sits between our ears," Obama said when he launched the initiative.

As a stroke surivor, I will be watching the developments of the BRAIN Initiative with great interest, but as an AFL footballer who still hopes to play his hundredth game, I will be glued to ABC News24 to see if this project can lead to the re-mapping of my brain and turning my dream of playing my hundredth game for the Pennant Hills Demons into reality.