Neuromorphic Brain Emulation

The US government's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has given a 4.9 million dollar grant to I.B.M. research and five universities for a new project. They basically want to reverse engineer the brain on a neuromorphic chip. I have mentioned about DARPA doing this in the past. However, then the deal was not yet finalized. You can read about the contract at DARPA's website. At the I.B.M. Almaden Research Center, Dharmendra Modha is now currently the manager of cognitive computing. You can read more information about this project at Modha's blog. Modha’s team has already been trying to reverse engineer the human brain. Modha estimates that by 2018 we will have the capability to simulate the entire human brain in real time on a computer. Modha’s group has already published a paper about simulating a rat brain in real time.

The human cortex has about 22 billion neurons which is roughly a factor of 400 larger than our rat-scale model which has 55 million neurons. We used a BlueGene/L with 92 TF and 8 TB to carry out rat-scale simulations in near real-time [one tenth speed]. So, by naïve extrapolation, one would require at least a machine with a computation capacity of 36.8 PF and a memory capacity of 3.2 PB. Furthermore, assuming that there are 8,000 synapses per neuron, that neurons fire at an average rate of 1 Hz, and that each spike message can be communicated in, say, 66 Bytes. One would need an aggregate communication bandwidth of ~ 2 PBps.

Modha also believes that nanotechnology will enable researchers to develop and replicate at the nano-scale the structure of a real human brain. Modha recently gave a talk at the 2008 singularity summit.

Here's an excerpt from the IBM press release about this new project.

IBM and its collaborators have been awarded $4.9 million in funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for the first phase of DARPA’s Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) initiative. IBM’s proposal, “Cognitive Computing via Synaptronics and Supercomputing (C2S2),” outlines groundbreaking research over the next nine months in areas including synaptronics, material science, neuromorphic circuitry, supercomputing simulations and virtual environments. Initial research will focus on demonstrating nanoscale, low power synapse-like devices and on uncovering the functional microcircuits of the brain. The long-term mission of C2S2 is to demonstrate low-power, compact cognitive computers that approach mammalian-scale intelligence.

Its still too early to say how much this research will actually accomplish. I suspect we may be able to simulate some of the processes of the brain relatively well. However, I think it may be fairly difficult to get that brain to be conscious. If we do successfully replicate consciousness it brings up all sorts of ethical issues, like how ethical is it to make a conscious human brain replica?

There are a variety of ways of going about creating a brain. This could include computer brain simulations (see here and here), neuromorphic chips or even possibly using stem cells to synthesize whole brain tissue. I think eventually we will be able to replicate a brain fairly well. If not on a computer or neuromorphic chip, then definitely using actual neurons possibly created from stem cells. Sufficiently advanced nanotechnology should allow the precise placement of neurons, dendrites and synapses. With sophisticated brain imaging techniques, this could allow scientists to create an exact replica of someone's brain.

Here's a video about the project.