The Blue Brain Project is a collaborated effort to build a virtual brain piece by piece, reverse engineering the mammalian brain in an effort to provide neuroscientists with the tools necessary to unlock the functional secrets of the brain. The project has already succeeded in simulating the rat’s cortical column. Cortical columns are “packages” of neurons in the brain’s cortex, the outer wrinkly part. In human cortices, there can be a few millions columns, each column containing 80-100 neurons, or more, including up to the thousands. Cortical columns help to organize and structure the cortex, making connections and processing possible and efficient.
The ultimate goal of the Blue Brain Project is to simulate the entire human brain, with all its synapses and billions of neurons. It takes one computer to model a single neuron, so this task is daunting and requires many resources at this point. However, the research is moving along with the advancement of technology and with researchers simplifying the brain model by looking at the overall connectivity and morphology of the brain rather than focusing on single neurons.
This is a timeline of the project from its inception in 2005 to year 2010.
The research is still in infancy but has been increasing in depth and understanding. There is still a long road ahead but the researchers are focusing intently on their goals and are working to reach them.
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