Blue Brain

The human brain is the most complex structure in the known universe. It has more neurons than there are humans on Earth and more connections between the neurons than there are stars in our galaxy. Building computational models of this network can help in elucidating how we feel and think, but the task is staggeringly complicated. As a first step, the Blue Brain Project has set out to model part of the rat brain. Their first simulation is based on published anatomy from a multitude of scientific papers, and includes tens of thousands of neurons and millions of connections. It reproduces many experimental findings, such as the spontaneous activity shown here. This is only the beginning. The team wants to expand the model by including more details about the rat nervous system and by gradually increasing the size of their simulations. Eventually they plan to model the human brain too.

Written by Bertie Gyenes

Bertie Gyenes

Writer

Bertie is a PhD student in André Brown’s group at the MRC Clinical Sciences Centre. He is keen on brains, worms and flies, and will also read articles that have ‘high-throughput’ or ‘modelling’ in their title.

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• Video courtesy of the BBP/EPFL/Human Brain Project 2015
• Blue Brain Project, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) Biotech Campus, Geneva, Switzerland
• Image/video copyright held by the original authors
• Research published in Cell, October 2015