A working ‘replica’ of the human brain will be within reach in 10 years time according to neuroscientist Henry Markram of the Brain Mind Institute in Switzerland. Makram’s team has already modeled brain microcircuitry that ‘started to display some interesting emergent properties,’ and they are beginning a model of the whole brain that would run on a powerful supercomputer. The team hopes that such a model will help us to understand everything from the subtle mechanisms of brain disease to our perception of reality.
Image: Gaetan Lee -Flickr
Image: Gaetan Lee -Flickr
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2 comments:
What's it made of?
Right now the modeling is purely algorythmic and computer-based, but Markram speaks of 'constructing genetic algorithms that could grow microcircuits based on genetic information.' These would have emergent learning behaviors. Hardware-based biology? Stange stuff.
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