The
Blue Brain Project is an attempt to reverse engineer the human brain
and recreate it at the cellular level inside a computer simulation.
The project was founded in May 2005 by
Henry Markram
at the
EPFL
in
Lausanne, Switzerland.
Goals of the project are to gain a complete understanding of the brain
and to enable better and faster development of brain disease treatments.
The research involves studying slices of living brain tissue using microscopes and
patch clamp electrodes. Data is collected
about all the many different
neuron types.
This data is used to build biologically realistic models of neurons and
networks of neurons in the
cerebral cortex.
The simulations are carried out on a
Blue Gene supercomputer
built by
IBM. Hence the name "Blue Brain".
The simulation software is based around
Michael Hines's
NEURON, together with other custom-built components.
As of August 2012 the largest simulations are of mesocircuits containing around 100
cortical columns (image above right).
Such simulations involve approximately 1 million neurons and 1 billion synapses.
This is about the same scale as that of a
honey bee brain.
It is hoped that a rat brain neocortical simulation (~21 million neurons) will be achieved by the end of 2014.
A full human brain simulation (86 billion neurons) should be possible by 2023 provided sufficient funding is received.
