The size of the neocortex of the rat’s brain, that was digitally “re-mastered” (aka recreated), was that of a single grain of sand. The result of a large collaborative effort involving more than 80 researchers from 12 different countries, the model represents a tiny region of circuits in the rat’s primary somatosensory cortex, which receives sensory information from the whiskers and other parts of the body. After that, they imitated the brain activity and observed that the reconstruction resembled pretty much the living organism. A little bit of perspective reminds us that the human brain contains over 85 billion cells, but this is still ground-breaking news for the Human Brain Project, whose work has always been subject to skepticism and disbelief.
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The partial reconstruction of a rat brain is the ideal opportunity and research tool that allows researchers to digitally map a few of the characteristics of the animal’s brain cells and their connections. The feat is the work of 82 neuroscientists who have been on this project, dubbed “the Blue Brain”, for more than a decade. Bargmann has invested a lot in the Brain Initiative, another long-term research program, and he described the Blue Brain Project’s report as an “amazing tour de force”.
The leader of the two projects is Henry Markram, professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, declared this year that he and his 81 colleagues finally constructed the scheme of a fully functional part of the brain of 30,000 neurons.
Nonetheless, Markram says that the model reproduces emergent properties of cortical circuitry, so that manipulating it in certain ways, such as by simulating whisker deflections, leads to the same results as real experiments. “It paves the way for predicting the location, numbers, and even the amount of ion currents flowing through all 40 million synapses”, commented the project lead.
The virtual brain mimics the one found in a young rat, which would be made up of 30,000 neurons, each connected by a web of 40-million synapses. Researchers needed to first carry out hundreds of measurements of neurons and the electrical alerts they had been emitting.
The research was partly supported by the Human Brain Project, a 10-year European programme. The project has been widely criticised over the years for their overly ambitious goal of trying to recreate the human brain.
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The group of 800 scientists challenged the BHP to prove how they planned to accomplish their goal of recreating the digital version of the human brain. They argued that digitally encoding the human mind was too complicated for present know-how, plus, the undertaking was poorly managed.
