30,000 neurons in a computer

Marina Astvatsaturyan, Echo of Moscow 

An international group of 82 scientists published an article in the journal Cell (Reconstruction and Simulation of Neocortical Microcircuitry, in the open access – VM), the longest in the history of neuroscience – about computer modeling of a small part of the rat brain. 

As the New York Times notes, this research is partially supported by a $1 billion program that is designed for 10 years and is called the Human Brain Project, but it was conducted as part of a specialized project to digitally recreate the rat brain as a forerunner of the human brain model, this is the Blue Brain Project. 

Both programs are perceived ambiguously in the professional community, in particular, in 2014, hundreds of neuroscientists signed an open letter criticizing both the Human Brain Project itself and the coordination of research conducted within its framework. Nevertheless, now the head of both these projects, Henry Markram from the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, has announced that he, along with many colleagues from other countries, have received the first draft of a functional map covering 30 thousand brain cells. 

According to Markram, this is not yet a confirmation that scientists are actually able to reconstruct the human brain, consisting of 85 billion or more neurons, but the first step. Cori Bargmann, a member of the directorate of the new Kavli Neural Systems Institute at Rockefeller University and closely associated with the American long–term brain research project Brain Initiative, noted in a comment for the New York Times that the achievement of European colleagues is "aerobatics for accumulation data", but "simulations are still in their infancy, but because they can mean for larger-scale goals to recreate the entire brain, it is still unclear." "They built a plane and taxied to the runway, but I don't see a flight yet, although the work gives hope," Bargman summed up. 

Such digital reconstruction, according to Markram's idea, is a research tool that can be used to encrypt some characteristics of neurons and their connections inherent in the brain in general. And this, as the New York Times emphasizes, has nothing to do with the futuristic dream of being able to download a human personality into a computer. Recreating a section of the rat brain, the researchers did not register the details of each individual cell, they used data about a part of the cells to represent the whole, and by simulating some of the activities of such a digital "brain", they were convinced that the reconstruction works like a living tissue.

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19.10.2015