Scientists will build artificial brain within ten years

An artificial human brain sounds like something out of a science fiction movie and yet it is fast becoming science fact.

Leading scientists are claiming that they should be able to build a functional but artificial replica of a human brain within the next ten years or so.

One of those at the forefront of brain research is scientist Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project which was launched four years ago in 2005.

The Blue Brain Project is the first comprehensive attempt to reverse engineer the mammalian brain focusing in particular on the newer part of the brain, the neo cortex in order to understand brain function and also dysfunction through detailed simulations.

“It’s a new brain,” Markram explained. “The mammals needed it because they had to cope with parenthood, social interactions complex cognitive functions.”

Markram made an analogy between picking apart the structure of the human brain and cataloguing the shape, position and types of trees in the rain forest.

“But it is a bit more than cataloguing because you have to describe and discover all the rules of communication, the rules of connectivity,” he added.

Already the scientists in the Blue Brain Project have managed to build a software model of tens of thousands of unique neurons. They need one laptop just to do the calculations for one neuron which means they need thousands upon thousands of laptops to do the calculations for a whole brain, it’s just not practical.

At the moment they are using IBM Blue Gene Machine which has 10,000 processors which is helping the scientists figure out how the brain actually works.

Apparently circuitry patterns in different brains are similar despite the fact that each neuron is unique.

“And we think this is species specific, which could explain why we can’t communicate across species” said Markram.

Building a simulated human brain could potentially help us to gain a new understanding of complex mental illnesses and find new and better treatments for mental disorders.

Currently there are around 2 billion people suffering with some kind of mental disorder or impairment to the brain explained Markram speaking at a TED Global Conference in Oxford.

The Blue Brain Project maintains it is not an attempt to create an artificial brain and it is not an AI project, it is “focused on creating a physiological simulation for biomedical applications”.

So an artificial brain in other words. Intriguing!

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