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Brain power: This representation shows the connectivity of the 10,000 neurons and 30 million connections that make up a single neocortical column. (The different colors correspond to different levels of electrical activity.) Having created a biologically accurate computer model of a neocortical column scientists are now planning to model the entire human brain within just 10 years.
Credit: BBP/EPFL
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A Working Brain Model
A computer simulation could eventually allow neuroscience to be carried out in silico.
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An ambitious project to create an accurate computer model of the brain has reached an impressive milestone. Scientists in Switzerland working with IBM researchers have shown that their computer simulation of the neocortical column, arguably the most complex part of a mammal's brain, appears to behave like its biological counterpart. By demonstrating that their simulation is realistic, the researchers say, these results suggest that an entire mammal brain could be completely modeled within three years, and a human brain within the next decade.
"What we're doing is reverse-engineering the brain," says Henry Markram, codirector of the Brain Mind Institute at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, in Switzerland, who led the work, called the Blue Brain project, which began in 2005. (See "IBM: The Computer Brain.") By mimicking the behavior of the brain down to the individual neuron, the researchers aim to create a modeling tool that can be used by neuroscientists to run experiments, test hypotheses, and analyze the effects of drugs more efficiently than they could using real brain tissue.
