Blue Brain Project: Build a virtual brain in a supercomputer

Blue Brain Project: Build a virtual brain in a supercomputer

In 2005, a team of researchers at the Brain and Mind Institute of the École Polytechnique in Lausanne, Switzerland set out to do some truly wonderful things. Led by neuroscientist Henry Markram, the team, known as the Blue Brain Project, spent two years tearing down rat brains to the molecular level and using what they learned to reverse-engineer a highly detailed, functioning computer model of a rat's cortical column—a basic building block of brain structure.

You know that brains start with neurons, cells that can transmit electrochemical signals. A single neuron is like one person, standing around by themselves and playing an instrument. A cortical column is like an orchestra, with thousands of neurons communicating and working together to accomplish a single task. There are 10,000 neurons in a single rat cortical column. Ten thousand neurons, an amazing amount of complexity—just to do something simple, like twitch a single whisker. To make a whole functional rat brain, you need 100,000 cortical columns. The larger, more complex human brain is even more astounding, with some 100,000 neurons to a single cortical column and perhaps as many as 2 million columns.

Recreating that on a computer requires a frightening amount of processing capability. Each neuron, alone, needs the equivalent of a standard laptop. The computer that the Swiss team used to model a single rat cortical column is a massive beast, one of the fastest supercomputers in the world. But it's still not enough to do what Markram and his team want to accomplish next. Their new goal: Model the form and function of the entire human brain, cortical column-by-cortical column—a task that's likely to take more than a decade.