Scientists rely on computer models to understand the toughest concepts in science: the origin of the universe, the behavior of atoms, and the future climate of the planet. Now a computer model is being designed to take on the human brain. Neuroscientist Henry Markram of the Brain Mind Institute at the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Switzerland, has spent the last 15 years painstakingly mapping cells from the living brains of rats so that he can create a neuron-by-neuron simulation of the brain. With assistance from IBM (whose nickname, Big Blue, helped name the project), Markram hopes to have a virtual human brain, with all its 100 billion neurons, functioning by 2015.
Scientists still don’t understand many of the most essential functions of the brain, like memory or the fundamentals of brain disease and treatment. Markram’s model will electronically mirror the real brain’s biological behaviors, imitating mathematically the interactions among ...
