Scientists Construct Simulation of Brain Region

The Blue Brain Project is an initiative that was started by IBM and EPFL in July 2005, with the purpose of reverse-engineering a small portion of the mammalian brain, including that of humans. The ultimate goal of the research is to understand the functions and dysfunctions of the organ, by analyzing and simulating in the lab everything that can go wrong. Now, four years later, the first results are starting to show, as experts have announced that the first replica has been constructed, and the first results have come in. The newly constructed brain portion has been placed in a “virtual body” and has then had its behavior thoroughly assessed by the investigation team.

Experts in charge of the project say that preliminary tests have already revealed some interesting hints about the molecular and neural basis of thought and memory, and that increasing the size of the simulated brain portion is just a matter of money, as the knowledge has already been researched. Speaking at the European Future Technologies meeting in Prague, BBP representatives have stated that their simulation differs from previous models in the fact that the artificial brain is not made of codes.

Instead of being mathematically constructed, through complex algorithms meant to explain and predict certain behaviors, the Blue Brain has been completely reverse-engineered from biological data collected from human brains, right down to the molecular level. Thus far, the scientists working with the project have managed to recreate the neocortical column, a region of the neocortex that is responsible for integrating higher brain functions and thought.

The founder of the Brain Mind Institute in Switzerland, and the leader of the Blue Brain Project, Henry Markram, tells the BBC News that, “The thing about the neocortical column is that you can think of it as an isolated processor. It is very much the same from mouse to man – it gets a bit larger a bit wider in humans, but the circuit diagram is very similar.” He also adds that evolution has used the same blueprint for mammalian brains, but that a number of other “features” have been added as well in some species.

Speaking of the behavior the “brain” exhibits in a virtual body, Markram mentions that, “It starts to learn things and starts to remember things. We can actually see when it retrieves a memory, and where they retrieved it from because we can trace back every activity of every molecule, every cell, every connection and see how the memory was formed. The next phase is beginning with a 'molecularization' process: we add in all the molecules and biochemical pathways to move toward gene expression and gene networks. We couldn't do that on our first supercomputer.”