September 10, 2009
Reverse Engineering The Brain
A common technique that hackers use to break into a computer system is to reverse engineer the software to decipher its vulnerabilities. A similar process has been underway to unlock the "software" of our brain. Although trying to understand our "operating system" has been a goal for centuries, two organizations have made this a serious undertaking. The Blue Brain Project which is part of the Brain Mind Institute (BMI) of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and a project called "SyNAPSE" which is located at the IBM Almaden Research Center.
Scientists have begin building detailed models of the trillions of synapses, billions of neurons, millions of proteins, and thousands of genes seen in the mouse, rat, cat, primate and human brain. The goal is a better understanding of the brain to better treat brain diseases while reducing the number of animals required to conduct lab research. "There is no brain disease for which we really understand what has gone wrong in the processing, in the circuits, neurons or synapses," according to Henry Markram, whose BMI Blue Brain Project has been building simulations with the help of IBM supercomputers that reverse-engineer the brain at the molecular and cellular levels. Their ultimate goal is to model the entire brain.
The IBM Almaden Research Center which is partly funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. Defense Department's research arm, is attempting to reverse-engineer the brain's computational abilities to better understand its ability to sense, perceive, act, interact and understand different stimuli. Although the brain is still not well understood, research has gathered sufficient quantitative data to begin putting together the pieces.
"Ray Kurzweil, CEO of Kurzweil Technologies, Inc., proposed that the fastest way to reverse engineer the brain may be to study the real thing. One condemned killer has already allowed his brain and body to be scanned, Kurzweil points out, and all 15 billion bytes of the now-digitized inmate can be accessed on the National Library of Medicine's Web site.
It is predicted that by 2018, computers will be able to simulate the workings of the human brain.
Source: Scientific American
IBM Almaden Research Center
Brain Mind Institute
DARPA