Understanding the Brain?
May 18, 2008
The École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) is the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland. According to EPFL, the Blue Brain project is the first comprehensive attempt to reverse-engineer the mammalian brain, in order to understand brain function and dysfunction through detailed simulations.
Their website contains a small selection video clips shows examples of the network and first simulations in action.
Henry Markram, the neuroscientist who directs the Blue Brain Project, explained in the February 2008 issue of Seed magazine, “Consciousness is just a massive amount of information being exchanged by trillions of brain cells. If you can precisely model that information, then I don’t know why you wouldn’t be able to generate a conscious mind.”
Today, that goal appears very far off. With two million or so neocortical columns in the human brain, scaling up the current simulation architecture would require hundreds of billions of dollars worth of the Blue Gene/L supercomputers it runs on now. Nevertheless, Markram is optimistic that they’ll be able to simulate a human brain on one computer in 10 years or less.
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