A detailed simulation of a small region of a brain built molecule by molecule has been constructed and has recreated experimental results from real brains. The ‘Blue Brain’ has been put in a virtual body, and observing it gives the first indications of the molecular and neural basis of thought and memory. Scaling the simulation to the human brain is only a matter of money. The work was presented at the European Future Technologies meeting in Prague. The Blue Brain project launched in 2005 as the most ambitious brain simulation effort ever undertaken. While many computer simulations have attempted to code in ‘brain-like’ computation or to mimic parts of the nervous systems and brains of a variety of animals, the Blue Brain project was conceived to reverse-engineer mammal brains from real laboratory data and to build up a computer model down to the level of the molecules that make them up. The first phase of the project is now complete; researchers have modeled the neocortical column - a unit of the mammalian brain known as the neocortex which is responsible for higher brain functions and thought.
The thing about the neocortical column is that you can think of it as an isolated processor. It is very much the same from mouse to man - it gets a bit larger a bit wider in humans, but the circuit diagram is very similar. The column is being integrated into a virtual reality agent - a simulated animal in a simulated environment, so that the researchers will be able to observe the detailed activities in the column as the animal moves around the space. It starts to learn things and starts to remember things. We can actually see when it retrieves a memory, and where they retrieved it from because we can trace back every activity of every molecule, every cell, every connection and see how the memory was formed. The next phase of the project will make use of a more advanced version of the IBM Blue Gene supercomputer that was used in the research to date. The next phase is beginning with a 'molecularisation' process: we add in all the molecules and biochemical pathways to move toward gene expression and gene networks.More information:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8012496.stm