Blue Brain Project Scepticism
The Blue Brain Project is an overly ambitious project aiming to simulate real brains. Two models are planned to be built, one a molecular model of the neurons involved. The other will clone the behavioural model of columns thousands of times to produce a complete neocortex, and eventually the rest of the brain.
The end product is expected to take at least a decade to achieve.
Henry Markram, one of the leading proponents of the Blue Brain Project, had this to say in Feb 2006:
“Alan Turing (1912–1954) started off by wanting to ‘build the brain’ and ended up with a computer…. As calculation speeds approach and go beyond the petaFLOPS range, it is becoming feasible to make the next series of quantum leaps to simulating networks of neurons, brain regions and, eventually, the whole brain. Turing may, after all, have provided the means by which to build the brain.”
Alan Turing notwithstanding, I don’t see how the Blue Brain Project can succeed given our current lack of neuroanatomical knowledge, which includes our ignorance of whole-brain neural connectivity. It would seem that we first need to establish a firm neuroanatomical grounding before embarking on any massive modeling attempt that claims to be neurobiologically-plausible. Until that neuroanatomical foundation is established, it is justifiable to remain sceptical about the success of the Blue Brain Project.
What I find amusing, which is evident when you visit the Blue Brain Project site, is that the project places great importance on the neocortical column (NCC), as if this were the magical unit of the brain that explains its function. They disregard the fact that the NCC is interconnected with dozens of other brain areas, including thalamus and midbrain, and is part of a very complicated network. Yet they choose to focus on the NCC as if that were the holy grail of the brain. It’s not.
Markram goes on to state:
“Nevertheless, this defeat of a human master (Gary Kasparov) by a computer (Deep Blue) on such a complex cognitive task (chess, which is not so much complex as it is combinatorial) posed the question of whether the relevant world of an organism could simply be described by enough if–then conditions. It could perhaps be argued that artificial intelligence, robotics and even the most advanced computational neuroscience approaches that have been used to model brain function are merely if–then-like conditions in various forms.”
In other words, Markram would like to reduce the operations of the brain to a series of if-then-else conditions. This is fine for digital logic and computers, but is inappropriate for analog computing and the inherent nonlinear dynamics of the brain. A few circuit diagrams of canonical circuits of the brain is a far cry from realistic modeling of the intricate complexities of the brain. In my opinion, the Blue Brain Project is doomed to failure. Deep Blue may have beaten Kasparov at the utterly mindless task of combinatorial chess play, but the Blue Brain Project will never, within the foreseeable future, rival a real mammalian brain in function. I would like to be proven wrong on this one, but being intimately acquianted with both the power of simulation and the intricate complexity of the brain, I know I’m not. We are not in a position today to make realistic simulations of the brain. Maybe in a decade or so, we will be.
Note that I am not alone in my opinion:
“This is an ambitious project that is bound to fail. We are still far from understanding enough about the brain to build detailed models”
–Terrence Sejnowski
While I’m very sceptical of the Blue Brain Project, I will be keeping an eye on their progress.