Blue Brain Project: Rebuilding The Brain To Understand It Better
The human brain has been described as the most complex system that exists, but that does not prevent neuroscientists and engineers from dreaming of fully understanding its functioning. In fact, some of them have even proposed to create a digital reproduction of the human brain to be able to carry out research with it that would be impossible to carry out from observation and experimentation with a real functioning nervous system.
This is precisely the objective of the Blue Brain Project, an incredibly ambitious initiative that was launched in 2005, promoted by IBM and a Swiss university (École Polytecnique Fédérale de Lausanne, or EPFL).
For more than ten years, the Blue Brain Project has been building a computer model that contains information about the structure and functioning of a small part of a rat’s brain. This digital reconstruction, which today corresponds to little more than a third of a cubic millimeter of tissue, aims to faithfully reproduce the way in which nerve cells connect and activate each other and even the way in which which these activation patterns cause the brain to physically change over time due to brain plasticity.
In addition to covering many other areas of the brain, the Blue Brain Project must make the qualitative leap that involves going from digitally reconstructing the brain of a rat to doing the same with the human brain much larger and more complex.
The goal of the Blue Brain Project is, ultimately, create a computer model that can predict to some degree how an area of neuronal tissue will activate if stimulated in a certain way That is to say, the aim is to create a tool that allows us to test hypotheses and try to repeat all types of experiments carried out with real brains multiple times to see if the results obtained are solid and not the result of chance.
The potential of this project could be enormous, according to its promoters, since the existence of a digital reconstruction of large extensions of neurons would allow obtaining a “test dummy” in which to experiment with all types of different situations and variables that would affect the way in which the nerve cells of a human brain are activated.
With this model, one could, for example, study how all types of cognitive processes work, such as our way of evoking memories or imagining action plans, and one could also predict what type of symptoms would produce an injury in certain areas of the brain. cerebral cortex. But it could also serve to solve one of the great mysteries of the human brain: how consciousness arises, the subjective experience of what we experience.
Studying consciousness
The idea that consciousness arises from the coordinated work of large networks of neurons distributed throughout the brain, instead of depending on a well-defined structure hidden somewhere in the central nervous system, is very healthy. This leads many neuroscientists to believe that To understand the nature of consciousness, it is important to look at the synchronized activation patterns of many thousands of neurons at the same time and not so much studying anatomical structures of the brain separately.
The Blue Brain Project It would precisely allow us to observe and intervene in real time on the activation patterns of many neural networks something that can only be done to a very limited extent with real brains, and see, for example, what changes occur when someone goes from being awake to sleeping without dreaming, and what happens when consciousness returns in the form of dreams during the REM phase.
The drawbacks of the Blue Brain Project
It is estimated that a human brain contains about one hundred billion neurons. To this we have to add that the functioning of the nervous system is explained more by how the neurons interact with each other than by their quantity, which can vary greatly without affecting the overall functioning of the brain, and therefore what is relevant are the thousands of synaptic connections. that each neuron can establish with the others. In each synaptic connection between two neurons, there are also millions of neurotransmitters that are continuously released This means that faithfully recreating a human brain is an impossible task, regardless of the number of years dedicated to this endeavor.
The creators of the Blue Brain Project have to make up for these shortcomings by simplifying the functioning of your digital brain. What they do, fundamentally, is study the functioning of a small part of the brain of several rats (information collected over twenty years) and “condense” this information to develop an algorithm made to predict the activation patterns of these nerve cells. Once this was done with a group of 1,000 neurons, the researchers used this algorithm again to recreate 31,000 neurons activating in the same way.
The fact that the construction of this provisional model has been so simplified and that the same is going to be done with the human brain that is to be recreated has caused many voices to be raised against this expensive and slow-developing project. Some neuroscientists believe the idea of digitally recreating a brain is absurd, since the nervous system does not work with a binary language or a predefined programming language. Others limit themselves to saying that the costs are too high for the performance that can be obtained from the project. Time will tell if the Blue Brain Project initiative bears the expected results.
