Communications of the ACM
Bringing a Virtual Brain to Life
The Human Brain Project seeks to create a virtual model of the human brain, to fuel advances in computing and robotics.
Credit: Pearson Education Inc.
Henry Markram's Human Brain Project brings together more than 150 institutions to create a virtual brain, a controversial effort that critics say is not possible in the 10-year time frame of a recent $1.3 billion European Union grant.
Early in his career, Markram made a famous discovery pertaining to how the brain learns cause and effect. The experiment led Markram to realize that experimenting on two neurons at a time was not sufficient to make real progress linking neurons to behavior. This led to his 2008 creation of Blue Brain, a digital facsimile of a cylindrical piece of tissue in the rat cortex.
By 2011, Markram and his colleagues said they had simulated a virtual slice of brain tissue with one million neurons. Markram then proposed the larger-scale Human Brain Project, increasing the scale of Blue Brain to model the human brain.
Markram believes the Human Brain Project will offer a "unifying principle" for scientists, centralizing data from around the world. The project aims to fuel major advances in computing and robotics, with one branch dedicated to creating intelligent robots with neuromorphic microchips designed like human neurons.
From The New York Times
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