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The Human Brain Project ☞ reconstructing the brain piece by piece and building a virtual brain in a supercomputer
(Click image to go to the The Human Brain Project)
“The brain, with its billions of interconnected neurons, is without any doubt the most complex organ in the body and it will be a long time before we understand all its mysteries. The Human Brain Project proposes a completely new approach. The project is integrating everything we know about the brain into computer models and using these models to simulate the actual working of the brain. Ultimately, it will attempt to simulate the complete human brain. The models built by the project will cover all the different levels of brain organisation – from individual neurons through to the complete cortex. The goal is to bring about a revolution in neuroscience and medicine and to derive new information technologies directly from the architecture of the brain.” — Human Brain Project - Introduction
The Blue Brain Project is an attempt to create a synthetic brain by reverse-engineering the mammalian brain down to the molecular level.
The aim of the project, founded in May 2005 by the Brain and Mind Institute of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland) is to study the brain’s architectural and functional principles. The project is headed by the Institute’s director, Henry Markram. Using a Blue Gene supercomputer running Michael Hines’s NEURON software, the simulation does not consist simply of an artificial neural network, but involves a biologically realistic model of neurons. It is hoped that it will eventually shed light on the nature of consciousness. (Wiki)
Henry Markram: Supercomputing the brain’s secrets
Henry Markram, Ph.D., Director of the Blue Brain Project at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, says the mysteries of the mind can be solved — soon. Mental illness, memory, perception: they’re made of neurons and electric signals, and he plans to find them with a supercomputer that models all the brain’s 100,000,000,000,000 synapses.
— Henry Markram builds a brain in a supercomputer, TED.com, July 2009
Henry Markram: Simulating the Brain — The Next Decisive Years
Henry Markram speaks at the International Supercomputing Conference 26.06.2011.
10 Year Documentary To Follow Bluebrain Project
Bluebrain | Year One from Couple 3 Films.
Noah Hutton (…) has recently released a mini-documentary on the first year of IBM’s Bluebrain Project. (…) There are reasons to be hopeful that Markram and others in the field will make reasonable progress in modelling the brain by 2020. As he points out in the video, modeling a single neuron used to be a PhD thesis in and of itself. Now, he can create thousands at the push of a button. As Markram mentions, we don’t have a complete understanding of how many drugs or diseases affect the brain. Nor do we fully understand the nature of memories. A brain simulator could be profoundly helpful as we care for our aging minds. Those minds have at least a decade to wait before we know if Markram and the BBP will be successful in transforming the field of neurology into a computer problem.”
— Aaron Saenz, 10 Year Documentary To Follow Bluebrain Project, Singularity Hub, Feb 12, 2011
See also:
☞ Human Connectome Project ☞ understanding how different parts of the brain communicate to each other
☞ New evidence for innate knowledge. Neurons make connections independently of a subject’s experience, Ecole Polytechnique
☞ Henry Markram and the Human Brain Project are in talks with EU for $1.61 billion to build a human brain within decade, May 18, 2011
☞ Mark Changizi, Later Terminator: We’re Nowhere Near Artificial Brains, Discover Magazine, Nov 16, 2011
☞ David Eagleman, Henry Markram, Will We Ever Understand the Brain?, California Academy of Sciences San Francisco, CA, Fora.tv video, Nov 2, 2011
☞ Allan Jones: A map of the brain, TED.com, July 2011.
☞ Neuroscience tag on Lapidarium notes
