Artificial brain ‘10 years away’
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By Jonathan Fildes
Technology reporter, BBC News, Oxford |
A detailed, functional artificial human brain can be built within the next 10 years, a leading scientist has claimed.
Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project, has already built elements of a rat brain.
He told the TED global conference in Oxford that a synthetic human brain would be of particular use finding treatments for mental illnesses.
Around two billion people are thought to suffer some kind of brain impairment, he said.
“It is not impossible to build a human brain and we can do it in 10 years,” he said.
“And if we do succeed, we will send a hologram to TED to talk.”
‘Shared fabric’
The Blue Brain project was launched in 2005 and aims to reverse engineer the mammalian brain from laboratory data.
In particular, his team has focused on the neocortical column - repetitive units of the mammalian brain known as the neocortex.
The team are trying to reverse engineer the brain
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“It’s a new brain,” he explained. “The mammals needed it because they had to cope with parenthood, social interactions complex cognitive functions.
“It was so successful an evolution from mouse to man it expanded about a thousand fold in terms of the numbers of units to produce this almost frightening organ.”
And that evolution continues, he said. “It is evolving at an enormous speed.”
