Mission to build a simulated brain begins

Isn’t this how they all begin; those movies where the machines end up taking over the world, don’t they all begin with the promethean idea of creating a human brain. Didn’t we learn anything from the Butlerian Jihad? Man shall make no machine in the image of a human mind.

An effort to create the first computer simulation of the entire human brain, right down to the molecular level, was launched on Monday. The “Blue Brain” project, a collaboration between IBM and a Swiss university team, will involve building a custom-made supercomputer based on IBM’s Blue Gene design. The hope is that the virtual brain will help shed light on some aspects of human cognition, such as perception, memory and perhaps even consciousness. It will be the first time humans will be able to observe the electrical code our brains use to represent the world, and to do so in real time, says Henry Markram, director of Brain and Mind Institute at the Ecole Polytecnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. It may also help in understanding how certain malfunctions of the brain’s “microcircuits” could cause psychiatric disorders such as autism, schizophrenia and depression, he says. Until now this sort of undertaking would not be possible because the processing power and the scientific knowledge of how the brain is wired simply was not there, says Charles Peck, IBM’s lead researcher on the project. “But there has been a convergence of the biological data and the computational resources,” he says. Efforts to map the brain’s circuits and the development of the Blue Gene supercomputer, which has a peak processing power of at least 22.8 teraflops, now make this possible.

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