Scientists Could Build An Artificial Brain In 10 Years Time
Posted on: Thursday, 23 July 2009, 13:17 CDT
A leading scientist has claimed that a detailed, functional artificial human brain could be built within the next 10 years, BBC News reported.
Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project, has already simulated elements of a rat brain.
A synthetic human brain would be of particular use finding treatments for mental illnesses, Markram told the TED Global conference in Oxford.
He said some two billion people are thought to suffer some kind of brain impairment and that it is not impossible to build a human brain within 10 years time.
Launched in 2005, the Blue Brain project aims to reverse engineer the mammalian brain from laboratory data, particularly focusing on the neocortical column – the repetitive units of the mammalian brain known as the neocortex.
"It's a new brain," Markram explained. "The mammals needed it because they had to cope with parenthood, social interactions complex cognitive functions."
He said it was so successful an evolution from mouse to man it expanded about a thousand fold in terms of the numbers of units to produce the organ.
And Markram says that evolution continues today, as it is evolving at an enormous speed. He and his team have picked apart the structure of the neocortical column over the last 15 years.
He likened it to cataloguing a bit of the rainforest, as in how may trees does it have, what shape are the trees, how many of each type of tree do we have, what is the position of the trees.
"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.
His team has been able to digitally construct an artificial neocortical column with a software model of "tens of thousands" of neurons - each one of which is different.
They have found that the patterns of circuitry in different brains have common patterns even though each neuron is unique.
Markram said we do actually share the same fabric even though each brain may be smaller, bigger, or may have different morphologies of neurons.
"And we think this is species specific, which could explain why we can't communicate across species.
The team feeds the models and a few algorithms into a supercomputer to make the model come alive and Markram said since you need one laptop to do all the calculations for one neuron, they would need ten thousand laptops.
But instead they use an IBM Blue Gene machine with 10,000 processors and the simulations have started to give the researchers clues about how the brain works.
For example, they can show the brain a picture of a flower and then follow the electrical activity in the machine, where it creates its own representation.
He said the ultimate goal is to extract that representation and project it so that researchers could see directly how a brain perceives the world.
However, the Blue Brain project has other practical applications besides advancing neuroscience and philosophy.
One experiment involves pooling all the world's neuroscience data on animals to create a "Noah's Ark" that researchers may be able to use to build animal models.
"We cannot keep on doing animal experiments forever," said Markram.
He believes their work may also give researchers new insights into diseases of the brain, as there are currently about two billion people on the planet affected by mental disorder.
Markram hopes the project may give insights into new treatments.
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Source: redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports
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