Blue Brain Project: reconstructing the brain to understand it better

IBM is behind the digital reconstruction of the human brain... that could change the world.

The human brain has been described as the most complex system in existence, but that doesn't stop neuroscientists and engineers from dreaming of fully understanding how it works. In fact, some of them have even set out to create some of them have even proposed to create a digital reproduction of the human brain in order to be able to in order to be able to conduct research with it that would be impossible to carry out by observing and experimenting with a real, functioning nervous system.

This is precisely the goal of the Blue Brain Project, an incredibly ambitious initiative launched in 2005 by IBM and a Swiss university (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, or EPFL).

What IBM has done so far

For more than ten years, the Blue Brain Project has been building a computer model containing information about the structure and function 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 how nerve cells connect and activate each other, and even how these activation patterns cause the brain to physically change over time due to brain plasticity.

In addition to encompassing many other areas of the brain, the Blue Brain Project has to make the qualitative leap from digitally reconstructing the brain of a rat to doing the same with the much larger and more complex human brain.much larger and much more complex.

What could this digital brain be used for?

The goal of the Blue Brain Project is, in short, to create a computer model that can predict to some degree how an area of neural tissue will be activated if stimulated in a certain way. In other words, the aim is to create a tool to test hypotheses and try to repeat multiple times all kinds of experiments carried out with real brains 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 make it possible to obtain a "test dummy" on which to experiment with all kinds of different situations and variables that would affect the way in which the nerve cells of a human brain are activated.

With this model it would be possible, for example, to study how all kinds of cognitive processes work, such as our way of evoking memories or imagining action plans, and it would also be possible to predict what kind of symptoms would produce a lesion in certain areas of the cerebral cortex. But it could also serve to solve one of the great mysteries of the human brain: how consciousness, the subjective experience of what we live, arises.

Studying consciousness

The idea that consciousness arises from the coordinated work of large networks of neurons distributed throughout the brain, rather than depending on a well-defined structure hidden somewhere in the central nervous system, is in very good health. 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 to study separate anatomical structures of the brain.and not so much to study anatomical structures of the brain separately.

The Blue Brain Project would allow us to observe and intervene in real time on the activation patterns of many neuronal networks, something that can only be done in a very short time.This can only be done in a very limited way with real brains, and to see, for example, what changes occur when someone goes from being awake to being asleep without dreaming, and what happens when consciousness returns in the form of dreams during the REM phase.

The drawbacks of the Blue Brain Project

A human brain contains an estimated 100 billion neurons. To this we must add that the functioning of the nervous system is explained more by how neurons interact with each other than by their number, 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, in addition, there are millions of neurotransmitters that are continuously released.. This means that faithfully recreating a human brain is an impossible task, no matter how many years are spent on the endeavor.

The creators of the Blue Brain Project have made up for these shortcomings by simplifying the functioning of their digital brain. What they do, essentially, is study the functioning of a small part of the brains 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 reused this algorithm to recreate 31,000 neurons activating in that same way.

The fact that so much has been simplified in the construction of this provisional model and that the same is to be done with the human brain to be recreated has caused many voices to be raised against this expensive and slow-developing project. Some neuroscientists believe that the idea of recreating a brain digitally is absurd, since the nervous system does not work.The nervous system does not work with a binary language or a predefined programming language. Others simply say that the costs are too high for the return that can be obtained from the project. Time will tell if the Blue Brain Project initiative bears the fruits expected of it.