Brain Projects Think Big

BIG BANG HUMAN BRAIN The universe started with the Big Bang some 13,500 million (billion) years ago. Then very recently, about 200,000 years ago, another " Big Bang " happened – Homo sapiens appeared on earth. It has many genetic similarities with other species such as the chimpanzee and, even more so, with other hominids such as the Neanderthals who lived with us until 30,000 or so years ago. But we are very unique in one particular sense, in that our brain evolved to become amazingly creative. We transmit information among us via sophisticated spoken and written language, we create art and science, and we envision new ideas and eventually build new things (toys, airplanes, cell phones, computers) like no one on earth ever did. What makes the human brain so creative, with its elementary constituents, such as nerve cells and their connections (" synapses "), and the neural network that they form in various brain regions (see Figure 1) is still a puzzle. When you read these words, hundreds of millions of nerve cells are electrically and chemically active in your brain. This activity enables you to recognize words, sense the world, learn, enjoy, and create new things, and be curious about the world around you. Indeed, our brains – those of Homo sapiens – are the most fascinating physical substances ever to have emerged on earth, some 200,000 years ago. The brain is so curious and ambitious that it strives to understand itself and cure its fragile elements when it becomes sick. However , despite important recent advances in brain research, we still do not know how to put the pieces of the brain puzzle together. It is because of this that, very recently, several mega brain research projects have started around the world. We play a part in one them – the Human Brain Project (HBP) [1]. Its main aim is to systematically catalog all that we know about the brain, to develop ingenious experimental and theoretical methods to probe the brain, and to put together all that we have learned into a computer model of the brain. All of this is possible since our brain itself have designed powerful computers, the Internet and sophisticated mathematics and software tools, which will soon be powerful enough to model in the computer something as complex as the human brain. This project will provide a new and deeper understanding about …