Blue Brain : The Frontal Cortex

The Week In ScienceBlogs: Sign up for our newsletter.

Profile

Jonah Lehrer is a contributing editor at Wired. He's also written for The New Yorker, Seed, Nature, the Boston Globe and is a contributor to Radio Lab. He's the author of Proust Was A Neuroscientist. His new book is How We Decide.

My Books

Search

Blue Brain

Posted on: March 5, 2008 10:17 AM, by Jonah Lehrer

My article on the Blue Brain project is now online*:

It took less than two years for the Blue Brain supercomputer to accurately simulate a neocortical column, which is a tiny slice of brain containing approximately 10,000 neurons, with about 30 million synaptic connections between them. "The column has been built and it runs," Markram says. "Now we just have to scale it up." Blue Brain scientists are confident that, at some point in the next few years, they will be able to start simulating an entire brain. "If we build this brain right, it will do everything," Markram says. I ask him if that includes selfconsciousness: Is it really possible to put a ghost into a machine? "When I say everything, I mean everything," he says, and a mischievous smile spreads across his face.

It was a real joy reporting this piece. The Blue Brain team was unbelievably generous with their time and allowed me to loiter in their labs until I actually understood what was going on. Now we just have to wait and see what happens. I think it's fair to say that nobody knows what, exactly, this supercomputer is capable of. But if I were a betting man, I wouldn't bet against Henry Markram.

*You should still run out and buy the magazine for all the pretty pictures.

Find more posts in: Brain & Behavior

Comments (7)

I would say you guys are going too far with the technology in creating another brain and manipulating how it would hold memory with out a hippocampus or how it would run on, and how much it would cost.

Posted by: sriram durvasula | March 5, 2008 11:43 AM

Excellent article, read all of it. I'm still doubtful about the possibility of creating consciousness, but the rest of it sounded pretty interesting.

Posted by: Navaneethan Santhanam | March 6, 2008 2:03 PM

Future Expectations

Science,
the art of massaging
the mind of God
for gain.

either way,
you are not likely
to get much.

Posted by: jfrancis | March 6, 2008 5:18 PM

Very cool! I heard about this in 2005 but had not realized how far along they'd got in just two years.

I've blogged briefly about it on the Pro-Test website http://www.pro-test.org.uk/b2evo/index.php?blog=7&title=animal_testing_outdated_you_have_got_to_&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

Posted by: Paul Browne | March 7, 2008 9:06 AM

I'm trying to write this as constructive criticism, but I really found this article to be mediocre. Though I don't know everything about Blue Brain, you seem to have written a fairly good description of what they have done.
Unfortunately, you committed some of the usual sins of scientific journalism of emphasizing uniqueness and removing context. It seems like you spoke to the Blue Brain team and no one else.

The article was very much framed as if this is a renegade project that mainstream science feels would be impossible. I doubt any of the nay-sayers quoted would be surprised they this team was able to build a believable cortical column... perhaps that they did it so fast, but not that it was done. They sounded doubtful of the end goal of the project. (What is a brain without a full range of sensory inputs and motor outputs? Can parts that control motion or digestion organically develop the same way as simulating a small range of sensory inputs?) Did you bother to get new quotes from any of the the critics to get their updated opinions on the project?

My other big critique was context. You make it sound as if they are going into new territory and give almost no background for neural computation. The basic concepts of what they've done go back to McCulloch and Pitts in the 1940's and then Hebb made an network system that was explictly designed to model part of a brain system. There are also other similar projects like
http://www.bostonretinalimplant.org/implant.php?fontsize=normal&hicontrast=
which is trying not only to fully model neural inputs and outputs for the retina, but put it on an implantable chip (No affiliation, but I briefly worked with some of the people now at the company)
The most unique thing about the Blue Brain Project is its size and commitment of resources and money. The success will be less measured in if they have a brain in silica 20 years from now and more whether they can help us better understand how the brain works 3 years from now. The article didn't really say anything new that this project taught us except that our current models are good enough to scale up successfully. I'm sure there's more, but it wasn't in the article.
Hope this helps.

Posted by: bsci | March 11, 2008 10:23 AM

Quoting from your article: "There is nothing inherently mysterious about the mind or anything it makes," Markram says. "Consciousness is just a massive amount of information being exchanged by trillions of brain cells. If you can precisely model that information, then I don't know why you wouldn't be able to generate a conscious mind."

Well, if that is true then would a machine processing somewhat less than massive amounts of information fall short of being conscious? Markram is going too far, logically, in asserting that a set of electrical impulses become consciousness simply because a similar set of impulses is observed to coincide with awareness in a human brain. At most, one could say it is a necessary condition that some such process be present for the associated experience of consciousness to occur in a living brain.

In any case, no process can be said to actually be consciousness, any more than a digital piano can be called a musician, even if it has a massive repertoire with complex programs that make it indistinguishable from a human player. Basically, no quantity of observed correlations between a brain, the information it processes, and what that brain's owner experiences is adequate to get us from the world of encoded information to the qualitative world of someone being informed. Consciousness could be an innate property of all living organisms, or of matter in general, or even be independent of matter, operating as a field that is concentrated and finds an interface in neural networks through some as yet unknown principle.

With a machine merely mimicking a brain's logical processes, however numerous or complex, it is truly preposterous to believe that a mind is at work inside the box. We don't even have a scientific model of what a thought is, let alone a measure of consciousness.

Posted by: Morphix | April 12, 2008 11:54 PM

Here is a very interesting video lecture of Henry Markram:

http://neuroinformatics2008.org/congress-movies/Henry%20Markram.flv/view

and there are more video lectures there.

Posted by: Someone | April 14, 2009 9:39 AM