Dr. Markram’s reconstruction is in no way the first step to the futuristic hope of uploading a human personality to a computer; it is a research tool that would be able to digitally encode a few characteristics and connections of neurons that are found in all brains.
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Henry Markram and colleagues have taken an engineering approach to this question by digitally reconstructing a slice of the neocortex, an area of the brain that has benefited from extensive characterization.
Based on the years of research, a group of more than 80 scientists has created a biologically-detailed computer simulation of rat’s brain. Although that sounds like a lot of cells, this is in no way proof that the human brain could be artificially reconstructed – considering that it contains 85 billion or more neurons. Scientists argued that it is too soon to pursue such an ambitious goal like artificially reconstructing the human brain, and they were upset by the way the projects were managed.
There’ still a few way to go, of course, before a third-of-a-millimetre cube scales up to the size of a human brain – but it’s a step in the right direction.
Here, it must be mentioned that the Human Brain Project is a ten-year long European research program investing a sum of over $1 billion.
After completing the reconstruction of their digital brain, the researchers used supercomputers to put the neurons through a simulation of different behaviors. This involved mapping out 30,000 neurons and 40 million synapses, and uploading all the rules and definitions for how they interact with each other.
A team of scientists from the Blue Brain Project has come up with a few really optimistic results toward stimulating human brains. According to reports by EurekAlert, the Blue Brain Project researchers plan to continue exploring the state-dependent computational theory while improving the model they’ve built. “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 project objective is defining different types of neurons present in the brain, measure their properties with regard to electric firing and lay a road map of circuits connecting the neurons with one another.
Simulating the emergent electrical behaviour of this virtual tissue on supercomputers reproduced a range of previous observations made in experiments on the brain, validating its biological accuracy and providing new insights into the functioning of the neocortex.
But Markram said that the task is full of difficulties.
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A paper describing the rat-brain model, published on 8 October in the journal Cell, provides a glimpse of Markram’s vision.
