Scientists Upload Rat’s Brain into A Computer

Scientists have built a simulated rat brain within a supercomputer, an incredible achievement pointing to a future where machines can mimic human minds. The size of the neocortex of the rat’s brain, that was digitally “re-mastered” (aka recreated), was that of a single grain of sand.

The digital recreation showed an extremely complex pattern of nerves and brain cells.

The renovation set out by building three dimensions kind of the neurons from rat’s human brain.

Other researchers also received the paper with criticism when they learned that scientists digitally recreated essential area of rat brain.

Henry Markram, the man who oversees both projects, claimed that the reconstruction gave him and his colleagues the possibility to see a working map of 30,000 brain cells.

The reconstruction that Dr. Markram envisions is a research tool that would digitally encode a few characteristics of neurons and their connections that are common to all brains.

“The electrical behaviour of the virtual brain tissue was simulated on supercomputers and found to match the behaviour observed in a number of experiments on the brain”, the research team commented on their project page. However, getting a full, high-resolution picture of all the features and activity of the neurons within a brain region and the circuit-level behaviors of these neurons is a major challenge. “It paves the way for predicting the location, numbers, and even the amount of ion currents flowing through all 40 million synapses”. The researchers still don’t have a clue how these simulations would look like in the reconstruction of a whole brain.

Nonetheless, Markram says that the model reproduces emergent properties of cortical circuitry, so that manipulating it in certain ways, such as by simulating whisker deflections, leads to the same results as real experiments.

However, the larger goal of reconstructing an entire brain – be that human or otherwise – is yet unclear, seeing that “simulations are in their infancy”. The feat is the work of 82 neuroscientists who have been on this project, dubbed “the Blue Brain”, for more than a decade. Back in 2014, hundreds of neuroscientists were rather vocal against the controversial research programs, and they signed an open letter in which they opposed the overall project and the practicability of the reconstruction target.

Henry Markram, leads both projects, and stated that this first draft means nothing on the feasibility of the Human Brain Project’s objectives – as the human brain contains 85 billion or more neurons – but it sure is a first step.

On top of all this, the critics argued that the potentially $ 1 billion-plus program was being poorly managed as well.