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Mouse Brain Simulated Via Computer

Posted by Zonk on from the i-have-some-business-in-nevada-see-you-on-the-net dept.

Mordok-DestroyerOfWo writes "Researchers from the IBM Almaden research lab and the University of Nevada have created a simulation of half a mouse brain on the BlueGene L supercomputer. 'Half a real mouse brain is thought to have about eight million neurons each one of which can have up to 8,000 synapses, or connections, with other nerve fibres. Modelling such a system, the trio wrote, puts "tremendous constraints on computation, communication and memory capacity of any computing platform."' Although there's more to creating a mind than setting up the infrastructure, does this mean that we may see a system for human mental storage within our lifetimes?"

4 of 268 comments (clear)

  1. Umm by Tx · · Score: 5, Interesting
    FTA:

    Half a real mouse brain is thought to have about eight million neurons

    and

    the researchers created half a virtual mouse brain that had 8,000 neurons


    How can it be half a mouse brain if it has 1/1000 the number of a real half mouse brain? Their simulated neurons also had less synapses than the real thing. So is the 8000 a typo, or am I missing something?
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    Oh no... it's the future.
  2. Re:Human Brain Simulation in our life time? by kestasjk · · Score: 3, Interesting

    We are learning slowly that we really aren't that complex. We just didn't know that yet. This is kind of like how we used to think living things spontaneously came into being, and how life was driven by a mysterious essence. Now we know it's simply trillions upon trillions of interacting cells reading from a database of genetic code and transcribing it into proteins, reacting oxygen to produce energy using intricate membranes and switching genes on and off during growth using hormones travelling down blood vessels, protected by an immune system that learns about different bacteria and viruses throughout life, all protected by a skin that constantly grows, sheds and repairs itself.

    We used to think that the liver was responsible for anger, and the heart was responsible for love, because those are the things that seemed to react when we felt those emotions. But boy did those bafflingly complex notions fly out of the door when we discovered emotion is due to having a mass of billions of interconnected ...

    I could go on and on and I have a very simplified laymans view of how the whole thing works.. I don't know how you can say we're starting to realize how simple we are, we're realizing how complex we are.

    GM foods, by the way, haven't had their actual genomes modified, they have new genes added that create new proteins that can do things like attack insects. It's nothing as complicated as actually changing an existing gene in a useful way, which would be much more difficult because of the ways genes interact in so many ways.
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    // MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
  3. IBM's Big Assumption: Newtonian Physics by reporter · · Score: 4, Interesting
    In the simulation of the mouse brain, IBM is making a big assumption: the brain operates only in the domain of Newtonian (a.k.a. classical) physics. So, the IBM programmers just encode the simple physical laws (governing the flow of electrical energy) in the C language.

    However, there is an alternate theory of consciousness, based on quantum physics. It is inherently non-deterministic and cannot be modeled in a computer.

    Hence, IBM's big assumption may be wrong. However, at least, the IBM experiment will tell us whether the operation of the brain is strictly Newtonian. If this artifical brain behaves differently from a mouse brain, then we would know that non-Newtonian physics is crucial to the operation of a flesh-and-blood brain.

  4. Re:Human Brain Simulation in our life time? by suv4x4 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    So was I the only one who read "system for mental storage" as meaning the transference of a human conciousness into a computer?

    That's just as unlikely. People used to computer technology know that the hardware structure and the software state are two completely different things. This is why you can build a model of the hardware, feed it the state, and bang, you have a Gameboy emulator (or whatever).

    But with biology, those two are intermixed. Brain saves information by changing the connections and structure itself. This means that you can build a model of a generic human brain, run it, and you have full blown AI.

    But you can't feed it the state of any human being. As every human being has different "wiring", hence won't "play" in your model.

    Someone mentioned Smalltalk. Smalltalk kinda works like a brain in that regard. State is structure is state.