Are We Just 10 Years Away From a Functional Artifical Human Brain

Firing Up the Blue Brain -"We Are 10 Years Away From a Functional Artifical Human Brain"

"It's a new brain. The mammals needed it because they had to cope with parenthood, social interactions, complex cognitive functions. 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 this almost frightening organ. It is evolving at an enormous speed."

Henry Markram, Director, Project Blue Brain.

Excellent news for fans of computer technology, neuroscience, and people who think that humans telling the machines what to do is totally backwards.  Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project, says we are ten years away from a functional artificial human brain. The Blue Brain project was launched in 2005 and aims to reverse engineer the mammalian brain from laboratory data.

We reported on the attempts of the Swiss Mind Brain Institute to simulate the neocortical column of the rat last year using an IBM Blue Gene machine with 10,000 processors, and they've announced success of the first phase of their project.

"We cannot keep on doing animal experiments forever," Markram told the audience at the TED Global Conference at Oxford, England. "There are two billion people on the planet affected by mental disorder," he told the audience. The project may give insights into new treatments."

They've successfully simulated the neocortical column of a rat – only a fraction of a full brain, but they proved that you don't get to do world-shattering research when you settle for second-best by choosing one of the most complicated and vital pieces of any mammalian cortex.

Firing Up the Blue Brain -"We Are 10 Years Away From a Functional Artifical Human Brain"

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