The Human Brain Project Begins

Amber Roguski,

Correspondent (Science)

 

What does it take to make a brain? 10 years, 135 research organisations and €1 billion from the European Union.

Last week on Monday, October 6, scientists from all over Europe attended the inaugural meeting for the Human Brain Project — the latest attempt to reveal the secrets of the brain and how it functions. The project was dreamt up by neuroscientist Henry Markram, who inspired by his lifelong fascination with the brain, proposed one of the most complex and radical research projects of the decade.

Markram first introduced the Human Brain Project to the public four years ago, where it was largely met with disbelief and dismissed by peers for being unrealistic. What Markram was proposing did seem next to impossible — a decade-long project to individually map the 86 billion neurons of the human brain by using a massive computer simulation. The only problem is that no computer currently exists that is capable of storing this huge amount of data.

An ‘exascale’ computer would be needed to store this quantity of information, with the ability to perform one quintillion operations per second. It is predicted that such a computer will be developed by 2020 and this is one of the first tasks engineers and computer scientists are working on. But creating a computer this size is just the tip of the iceberg. Even with an exascale computer, there is still the painstaking task of compiling all of the current data and research on the brain and neuronal mapping, which will be used to form the basis of the computer-simulated brain.

But why use computers to map the brain? “The fact is we are never going to experimentally map the human brain and people who think otherwise are deluding themselves,” explains Markram. “Instead, we have to search for the fundamental principles and then use those principles to construct a hypothesis of the bits of the brain no human has ever seen and no human will ever see. Then we have to test those hypotheses and refine the principles until our model gets better. Otherwise, we are just stabbing in the dark.”

Eventually, the aim is to use the completed simulation to study brain disorders and diseases. It is difficult to objectively diagnose brain diseases currently and the Human Brain Project will have a massive impact on psychiatry. Maps will be made of neurological disorders, allowing researchers to investigate causal links in the brain, and to identify similarities between different psychiatric conditions.

Image Courtesy: By Playing Futures: Applied Nomadology [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons