Apparently, the replication of a human mind that is so complex a task is not a daunting task for Professor Markram.
Markram was quoted as saying, “I absolutely believe it is technically and biologically possible. The only uncertainty is financial. It is an extremely expensive project and not all is yet secured.”
He further said, “The brain is of course extremely complex because it has trillions of synapses, billions of neurons, millions of proteins, and thousands of genes
. But they are still finite in number. Today’s technology is already highly sophisticated and it allows us to reverse engineer the brain rapidly.”
Elaborating on the hi-tech technology that is available today, Markram said, these days we have robots that can do screenings and mappings ten thousand times quicker than human scientists and technicians.
Data and knowledge gathered over years needs to be connected
The difficulty in making a model of the human brain is that with so many advancements in neuroscience in the past 100 years, millions of portions of data and knowledge have been discovered. But all these fragments have never been amalgamated together and exploited to the maximum.
“Actually no one even knows what we already understand about the brain,” explained Professor Markram.
He said, “A model would serve to bring this all together and then allow anyone to test whatever theory you want about the brain. The biggest challenge is to understand how electrical-magnetic-chemical patterns in the brain convert into our perception of reality.
“We think we see with our eyes, but in fact most of what we ‘see’ is generated as a projection by your brain. So what are we actually looking at when we look at something ‘outside’ of us?”
Microcircuit of the brain developed
Professor Markram is very excited at the new challenge and believes that the most fascinating part of his research is the fact that he has put together thousands of minute pieces of information that his lab had gathered over the past 15 years. He was then able to see as to what a microcircuit of the brain looks like.
Sharing his excitement, Markram said, “When we first switched it on it already started to display some interesting emergent properties. But this is just the beginning because we know now that it is possible to build it. As we progress we are learning about design secrets of our brains which were unimaginable before.”
He further added, “In fact the brain uses some simple rules to solve highly complex problems and extracting each of these rules one by one is very exciting. For example we have been surprised at finding simple design principles that allow billions of neurons to connect to each other. I think we will understand how the brain is designed and works before we have finished building it.”
Brain model to serve many purposes in future
Markram elaborated that there are a plethora of future prospects for this neuroscience research challenge.
He said, “A brain model will sit on a massive supercomputer and serve as a kind of educational and diagnostic service to society.”
With the progression of industrial revolution in science, man will be able to produce more and more data than anyone can trail or any computer can stock up.
Dwelling on the benefits of a brain model, Markram added that it is imperative to construct models for curing various brain diseases that affect almost two billion people across the globe. As of now, there is no clarity or understanding of what goes wrong in the circuits, neurons or synapses when a person suffers from a brain disease.
Moreover, if a brain model is built, there will be no need of using millions of animals every year for brain research.
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