About the Blue Brain Project

The cerebral cortex, the convoluted "grey matter" that makes up 80% of the human brain, is responsible for our ability to remember, think, reflect, empathize, communicate, adapt to new situations and plan for the future. The cortex first appeared in mammals, and it has a fundamentally simple repetitive structure that is the same across all mammalian species.


The brain is populated with billions of neurons, each connected to thousands of its neighbors by dendrites and axons, a kind of biological "wiring". The brain processes information by sending electrical signals from neuron to neuron along these wires.

In the cortex, neurons are organized into basic functional units, each containing about 10,000 neurons that are connected in an intricate but consistent way. These units operate much like microcircuits in a computer. This microcircuit, known as the neocortical column (NCC), is repeated millions of times across the cortex. The difference between the brain of a mouse and the brain of a human is basically just volume - humans have many more neocortical columns and thus neurons than mice.


Title: Whole Column
Description: Visualization of an entire neocortical column with network activity. The membrane voltage is shown in false colors. This provides a view into the neocortical column at a level inaccessible to experimental techniques to date.
Author: BBP/EPFL

The Blue Brain project is a collaboration between the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale di Lausanne and IBM. There are also inputs from other universities in Spain, Israel, USA and UK.

The first step of the Blue Brain project is to re-create this fundamental microcircuit, down to the level of biologically accurate individual neurons. The microcircuit can then be used in simulations. The Blue Brain project does not aim to create an artificial brain but to explore how it functions and to serve as a tool for neuroscientists and medical researchers. It is not an attempt to create a brain. It is not an artificial intelligence project.

How will replicating the neocortical columns help us to understand the brain?

Replicating the column is a key and "secret" evolutionary step, and if we can capture how this is done we will be able to explain how the brain changed from one species to another in evolution. Mimicking the expansion of the neocortex will also allow us to examine how the computing power changes as the brain expands. It will also allow us to begin understanding EEG recordings in the clinics as well as fMRI studies. It requires connecting all parts of the brain together and this by itself will reveal many important principles of how the brain as a whole is connected - at the cellular level.

text from "About the Blue Brain Project" at: http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/page18699.html