Getting Inside Your Head

"This technology is unstoppable," says Stanford's Rangel. That is precisely what motivated Mazziotta to set up the atlas project in the first place: with the proliferation of scanning, there was a flood of information about the brain but nowhere to put it. "Up to now there has been no way to compare imaging work done in one lab to another, or from one person to another. We needed to have some way to organize all this data." The trick now is to figure out how best to use it.