What company would pay for this kind of research without expecting some sort of profitability from it? I imagine Facebook is trying to figure out how to brain works, but I hope they don't get very far.

If you are the kind of person that might be able to figure out what the brain is doing, chances are a company is going to pay you better and provide more resources to you than just about any university.

But will they pay you to figure out what the brain is doing, or what the brain is doing that increases margins?

Depends on the resources. Amazon undoubtedly has much more compute, but they’re not exactly known for their wetlab facilities—-and this question undoubtedly needs both.

That said, I think you are right that academia’s structure may need to change. Right now, we’re locked into a model where projects mostly need to be doable by a handful of researchers (almost entirely trainees) in a few years. Other than these time-limited positions, there’s not a lot of room for skilled individual contributors, which seems goofy when tackling such a hard problem.

That would be one of the best one-time investments made by humanity then, but I don't think throwing X billions at the problem can solve it.

>That would be one of the best one-time investments made by humanity then

This has been done for thousands of years, we are not the only generation who found it's important to understand how we work.