y with digitized image processing, in a way that would help surgeons "maintain their bearings" of vascular and neurological sites even in the face of impaired visibility of sites in the physical organism (Thompson & Toga, 1996; Adams & Others, 1996). What was envisioned for the HBP was a significant diagnostic tool for brain surgery and other evaluations of brain dysfunction that would both integrate and function well beyond earlier generations of body-image scanning, such as PET, SPECT, and fMRI. With the new tools, diagnosticians would be able to map the brain surfaces and measure neural processes of patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and other maladies associated with brain dysfunction, such as brain tumors, and compare such maps with subjects not so diagnosed. More generally, the HBP objective was to help identify in which parts of the brain information processing of various kinds occurs. Scans of what are held to be normally and abnormally functioning or structured brains could, in theory, be compared, with a view toward getting a realistic sense of how pathology operates. The sheer variety of other-than-normal brain structures has posed data-processing challenges to a usable atlas, though in late 1999 an instructional (not diagnostic) computer CD comprising a version of a brain atlas did reach the market (Sutton, 1999).
Another study supported the hypothesis that changes in focus of attention are consistent with so-called serial processing of images, i.e., giving attention to only one thing at a time, though shifting attention very rapidly (Johnson, 1999). On the other hand, the brain can also function "in parallel," apparently when involuntary motor functions are involved, e.g., managing walking muscles while also listening to something: "But when it comes to tasks involving similar data items, the brain appears to time-division multiplex, that is, focus its attention on one object at a time so quickly that the consci...