Video is now available of Henry Markram’s presentation at TED, in which he talks about The Blue Brain Project’s efforts to build a supercomputer that will attempt to “reverse engineer the mammalian brain.” The project has made impressive progress to date, showing a proof of concept by modeling half a rodent brain, and the team expects to have a model of the human brain completed in the next 10 years.
Despite the immense computing power demonstrated by Blue Brain, the team makes it clear that they are not attempting to create an artificial intelligence, instead working to “understand brain function and dysfunction through detailed simulations.”
The project has focused, however, not only on building a model of the neocortical column, but on developing a generic facility that could allow rapid modeling, simulation and experimentation of any brain region, if the data can be measured and provided according to specifications. The facility has been used to build the first model of the neocortical column, which consists of 10,000 3D digitizations of real neurons that are populated with model ion channels constrained by the genetic makeup of over 200 different types of neurons. A parallel supercomputer is used to build the model and perform the experiments so that the behavior of the tissue can be predicted through simulations.
More information on the Blue Brain Project at their Web site here.