How to Build a Human Brain

How to Build a Human Brain | LiveScience:



Henry Markram plans to build a brain from scratch. A neuroscientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, he believes the only way to truly understand how human brains work — and why they often don't — is to create one, then subject it to a barrage of experiments.

Markram has established the Human Brain Project to do just that. The effort aims to integrate the hundreds of thousands of pieces of the brain puzzle that have been discovered by neuroscientists over the past few decades, from the structures of ion channels to the mechanisms of conscious decision-making, into a single supercomputer model: a virtual brain.

If the plan works, then the resulting model will be capable of learning and will gradually develop complex cognitive abilities, much like a living human. More importantly, its programmed structure, the brain code developed by the Human Brain Project, will become available for all the world's neuroscientists to do with as they please, whether that's subjecting it to virtual X-ray experiments, flooding it with the programmable equivalents of new experimental drugs, or disrupting its processes at any level and observing the effects.