Brain Technology

A talk about the Blue Brain project has recently been given at the European Future Technologies Conferfence. You can read some more stuff about it at this german site (they have an mp3 audio at that site, but it's in German unfortunately). Blue Brain seeks to simulate the functioning of the brain via a computer. Henry Markram is the main researcher on this project is. Markram is the founder of the Brain Mind Institute (BMI) and he has made some key insights about the functioning of neurons in the past.

Currently the researchers have completed the first phase of the project. It sounds like they still have only simulated 10,000 neurons and 30,000 synapses of a rat cortical column. The researchers are integrating the simulated brain into a virtual reality agent. So they will have a simulated animal that will be able to function in a virtual reality environment. This will allow researchers to view the changes in neuron functioning as the animal moves around its virtual environment. Markram told the conference "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." It's probably too soon to say how successful this will be. I think it may be a stretch to say that they can actually create a brain with the properties of consciousness. So I'd be a little skeptical, but Markram probably knows more about this than I do.

In future phases of the project they will use faster supercomputers that will allow scientists to add more details to the simulation. They plan on simulating biomolecular pathways and also gene expression patterns. Here's an excerpt from Markram's keynote speech at the beginning of the conference (Shaping 21st Century Science and Society) that sounds very similar to Ray Kurzweil in many respects.

There is no sign that the exponential growth in computing power is decreasing which means that we will see a 1000 fold increase each decade (exascale (10^18) by 2020, zettascale (10^21) by 2030, yottascale (10^24) by 2040). Such a growth in computing power within our lifetime comes with extreme challenges where information and computational devices need to be energy-efficient, fault-tolerant, capable of self-repair, and where storing and processing of the vast volumes of information generated is carried out with novel automated and highly intelligent information processing systems. The exponential trends of minimizing size and cost and maximizing speed and efficiency are so extreme that the evolutions and revolutions in ICT over the next 10-20 years will be equivalent to those of the past 100 years.

Markram talks about 3 elements that are transforming science. He mentions that data acquisition is increasingly becoming automated. He says there has been an exponential growth in the amount of DNA being sequenced and he predicts that we will know the DNA sequence of all organisms on the planet in 3 decades. There is also a greater ability to process large amounts of data through the use of statistical correlations and machine learning. He also says the computerization of science is leading to increased collaboration and productivity.

I think it seems feasible that these computer simulations will eventually allow extremely personalized medicine. Brain scanning technology is continuing to get better. In the future a person may be able to get their brain scanned and then have a computer simulation of their brain on their home computer. Ray Kurzweil has talked a lot about these exponential technological trends and how they could transform what it means to be human. Will there be ways to increase human happiness or human intelligence exponentially in the future? Who knows. I think a lot of interesting things will become possible assuming these simulations become increasingly accurate and realistic in their portrayal of the human brain.