Human Brain Project Would Build Computerized Mind by 2024

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Human Brain Project would build computerizedmind by 2024

Pipettes are placed near a rat brain sample for an experiment in a lab of the Blue Brain Project.(REUTERS/Denis Balibouse)

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Go ahead, do drugs,play football, or acquire your very ownbrain slug. As of 2024, it won't matter, since

we'll have a computer that'll be able to do everythingyour braincan do.

Since 2005, researchers at the Brain and Mind Institute of the cole Polytechnique have been working on

reverse-engineering a small piece of rat brains. This small piece is called a cortical column, and it's made up

of an intricate network of some 10,000 individual neurons, each one of which requires about as much

computer power as your average laptop to model. Put 100,000 of these columns together and you've got a

model of a fully-functional rat brain.

So that's all well and good if you're a rat, but if you're a human looking for a new brain, you're going to need

something a little more complicated. Think 100,000 individual neurons per cortical column and maybe two

million columns, which is some really big number of neurons that's going to require a correspondingly big

number of computer processors to accurately replicate.

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To make this happen, Blue Brain Project is hoping for 100 million euros a year for the next ten years to build

a ludicrously large and powerful brain-modeling computer. And when they're done with it, they hope to use it

to figure out why our brains do some of the weird stuff that they do, ranging from neurological disorders to

consciousness.

Check out a gallery of some pics of the project, and for more info, you can watch a TED Talk about ithere.

Blue Brain Project, viaBBG

(Thanks,Tanner!)

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Cables are pictured on the Internet server at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Ecublens,near Lausanne May 9, 2011. (REUTERS/Denis Balibouse)

The Human Brain Project

Blue Brains success in modeling the rat cortical column has driven the development of the Brain

Simulation Facility and has demonstrated the feasibility of the projects general strategy. But, this is

only a first step.

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The human brain is an immensely powerful, energy efficient, self-learning, self-repairing computer.

If we could understand and mimic the way it works, we could revolutionize information technology,

medicine and society. To do so we have to bring together everything we know and everything we

can learn about the inner workings of the brain's molecules, cells and circuits. With this goal in mind,

the Blue Brain team has recently come together with 12 other European and international partners to

propose the Human Brain Project (HBP), a candidate for funding under the EUs FET Flagship

program. The HBP team will include many of Europes best neuroscientists, doctors, physicists,

mathematicians, computer engineers and ethicists. The goal is to build on the work of the Blue Brain

Project and on work by the other partners to integrate everything we know about the brain in massive

databases and in detailed computer models. This will require breakthroughs in mathematics and

software engineering, an international supercomputing facility more powerful than any before and a

strong sense of social responsibility.

Experimental and clinical data is accumulating exponentially. Computers powerful enough to meet

the projects initial requirements are already here. As technology progresses and the project

discovers new principles of brain design, it will build ever more realistic models. The benefits for

society will be huge, even before it achieves its final goals. The HBPs thirst for computing power

will drive the development of new technologies for supercomputing and for scientific visualization.Models of the brain will revolutionize information technology, allowing us to design computers,

robots, sensors and other devices far more powerful, more intelligent and more energy efficient than

any we know today. Brain simulation will help us understand the root causes of brain diseases, to

diagnose them early, to develop new treatments, and to reduce reliance on animal testing. The

project will also throw new light on questions human beings have been asking for more than two and

a half thousand years. What does it mean to perceive, to think, to remember, to learn, to know, to

decide? What does it mean to be conscious? In summary, the Human Brain Project has the potential

to revolutionize technology, medicine, neuroscience, and society.