Scientists from 135 research institutions are in Geneva this week for the launch of the Human Brain Project. The goal of the neuroscience project is to foster a deeper understanding of how the human brain works.(from swissinfo.ch)
where does a neuron start?
“Today we are beginning a journey to unify our understanding of the brain. It’s a very exciting journey and a very difficult journey that will require hundreds if not thousands of scientists over the next ten years. It will provide us with the foundation to understanding mental health, brain disease and ultimately who we are as humans,” coordinator Henry Markam told swissinfo.ch on Monday. Markam is a neuroscientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL).
In January, the European Union (EU) selected the Human Brain Project (HBP) for one of its flagship grants, worth more than €1 billion (CHF1.23 billion). The project’s total budget is an estimated €1.2 billion.
Over the next 30 months, HBP scientists will set up and test research platforms covering the following subjects: neuroinformatics, brain simulation, high-performance computing, medical informatics, neuromorphic computing and neurorobotics. In 2016, these platforms will be ready for use by researchers all over the world.
As Markam told swissinfo.ch, the HBP will be especially helpful in coping with the challenges of aging.
“In the next few decades society faces enormous challenges of overpopulation and increasing aging and we are not ready. This will place new stresses on society and like a pressure cooker will produce new diseases,” Markam said.
“We believe this project will provide a concrete foundation for how to understand the brain, from genes through to cognition and behaviour. We will also be able to understand how the brain breaks down and gives us different diseases.”
(And at this point you will find a mainstream articel and a hint to their understanding of this very important Project. 6/66′)
What if you could build a computer that works just like the human brain? Scientists have started to imagine the possibilities: We could invent new forms of industrial machinery, create fully autonomous thinking cars, devise new kinds of home appliances. A new project in Europe hopes to create a computer brain just that powerful in the next ten years — and it’s incredibly well-funded. (from foxnews.com)
There’s just one catch: computers that fast simply haven’t been invented yet.
The Human Brain Project kicks off Oct. 7 at a conference in Switzerland. Over the next 10 years, about 80 science institutions and at least 20 government entities in Europe will figure out how to make that computer brain. The project will cost about $10 billion euros — or about $1.3B in US dollars.
The research hinges on creating a super-powerful computer that’s 1,000 times faster than those in use today. If you’re keeping track, that’s an “exascale” supercomputer, one fast enough to model a nuclear explosion or the complex, planetwide forces that shape the climate. Just a few years ago, scientists started using “petascale” supercomputers like Blue Waters at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in Illinois that went online last year.
“Well-known manufacturers of supercomputers like IBM, Cray, Intel, and Bull, are committed to building the first exascale machines by approximately 2020. So we are confident we will have the machines we need,” Henry Markram, the director of the Human Brain Project at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, told FoxNews.com. Markram also directs the Blue Brain project started in 2005 that hopes to reverse-engineering the human brain by rebuilding the molecules.
For scientists, these sorts of projects are all about understanding ourselves. The brain is the least understood organ in the human body. We don’t really know how the brain controls our thoughts, our bodily functions, or our behavior. And, Markham says the lack of processing power in modern computer is the least of our worries.
He says a computer brain will consume gigawatts of power, require new forms of memory, and force scientists to look at cutting edge storage techniques. But the immense technical hurdles will be worth the effort. The first phases will help us understand how the brain functions. In later phases, we’ll find out how we learn, how we see and hear, and why the brain sometimes doesn’t process information correctly.
Dr. Gayani DeSilva, a psychiatrist with a private practice in Orange, Calif., told FoxNews.com a human brain model could have “unimaginable” implications for medicine, helping us learn how we adapt, heal, and develop. “The more we know about our brains, the more we can utilize our brains to its full potential, intervene when issues arise, replicate in artificial creations the power of the brain’s ability to integrate a vast amount of information that then causes other systems to perform specific actions,” she says.
“The human brain is immensely complex, and a model reduces this complexity into a controlled system. In a model, scientists can test hypotheses as to how the human brain works, and what occurs in disease in order to understand how to treat neurological conditions. It’s analogous to astronauts training in a flight simulator prior to a shuttle launch,” added Amina Ann Qutub, a bioengineer at Rice University.
Fortunately, scientists won’t have to wait 10 years for the results. Markram says there will be initial models they can use for medical research with a year. In three years, they will have models that could help us build new kinds of computer chips. (That’s right: the brain project itself will help them build the computer brain.)
As with any cutting edge science, we don’t know yet what we don’t know. (“mh!” i’ll compare it to the found new knowledge in the field of human genomics. 6/66) Qutub says this is all unmapped territory. “The number of total cells including the neurons, vascular cells, and glia in a human brain is more than the number of stars in the Milky Way,” she said.
That’s enough to give scientists quite the headache.