Traces of thought

A computer simulation of the upper layer of a rat brain neocortical column. Dr. Pablo de Heras Ciechomski/Visualbiotech

These images, and their captions, come from an article introducing a project to simulate part of a rat's brain, to be scaled up to a whole brain and later put into a robot with legs. Excerpts below, full link at the bottom.

In the basement of a university in Lausanne, Switzerland sit four black boxes, each about the size of a refrigerator, and filled with 2,000 IBM microchips stacked in repeating rows.
...
This is Blue Brain. The name of the supercomputer is literal: Each of its microchips has been programmed to act just like a real neuron in a real brain. The behavior of the computer replicates, with shocking precision, the cellular events unfolding inside a mind.
...
The first phase of the project—“the feasibility phase”—is coming to a close. The skeptics, for the most part, have been proven wrong. 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.
...
In fact, the model is so successful that its biggest restrictions are now technological. “We have already shown that the model can scale up,” Markram says. “What is holding us back now are the computers.” The numbers speak for themselves. Markram estimates that in order to accurately simulate the trillion synapses in the human brain, you’d need to be able to process about 500 petabytes of data (peta being a million billion, or 10 to the fifteenth power). That’s about 200 times more information than is stored on all of Google’s servers.
...
“There’s no reason why you can’t get inside Blue Brain,” Markram says. “Once we can model a brain, we should be able to model what every brain makes. We should be able to experience the experiences of another mind.”
...
“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.”

Full article at seedmagazine.com

An entire neocortical column lights up with electrical activity. Modeled on a two-week-old rodent brain, this 0.5 mm by 2 mm slice is the basic computational unit of the brain and contains about 10,000 neurons. Visualbiotech.

Related post: Other substrates