A top boffin has told the
BBC that a detailed, functional artificial human brain can be built within the
next 10 years.
Henry Markram, who heads the Blue Brain Project, said he has
already built bits of a rat's brain which is only one stage up from a
politician's. He said that a synthetic human brain would be of particular use
finding treatments for mental illnesses. Blue Brain was launched in 2005
and aims to reverse engineer the mammalian brain from laboratory data.
So
far the boffins have focused on the neocortical column repetitive units of
the mammalian brain known as the neocortex. The project now has a software
model of tens of thousands of neurons and have digitally constructed an
artificial neocortical column. Although each neuron is unique, the team has
found the patterns of circuitry in different brains have common
patterns.
Of course there are few problems with scale. You need one laptop to
do all the calculations for one neuron or one IBM Blue Gene machine with
10,000 processors to simulate one rat's brain.