( August 25, 2021; MIT Technology Review )
A decade ago, people thought that brain mapping projects would put us on the cusp of understanding the human brain. Now, initiatives in the US and EU have spent billions of dollars on the idea, and this article argues that there have been incremental advances, but overall the results are disappointing and the projects raised more questions than answers.
Some of the incremental advances include a sort-of Google Earth for the brain and EBRAINS which is a platform that helps neuroscientists work with neurological data.
A decade later, the US project is winding down, and the EU project faces its deadline to build a digital brain. So how did it go? Have we begun to unwrap the secrets of the human brain? Or have we spent a decade and billions of dollars chasing a vision that remains as elusive as ever?
Read the rest from MIT Technology Review: How big science failed to unlock the mysteries of the human brain
Check the #penny4thoughts tag to find other active conversations.
The project seems over ambitious from the very start. With all the billions of neurones in the brain, how is the mapping going to be possible?
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I remember when these projects launched, and they seemed plausible to me at the time. The argument was that they had already made artificial brains with the same number of neurons as rat brains or mouse brains, so they were just scaling it up, but that turned out to be harder than I imagined.
The article also points out that even if you could completely model the brain in silicon, you still wouldn't be able to understand how the mind interacts with the senses.
There's another interesting write-up of the challenges, from IBM, here. Their True North chip was released in 2014, and it had 1,000,000 neurons and 46 billion synapses. Here's what they wrote about simulating the brain:
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To unlock the mystery of the brain and explain each little piece of the puzzle, it might take more computational power, or it might just mean embracing the power of big data. The good news is that technology is advancing to the point where we can gather and store that data in larger and larger amounts. And in recent years, there’s been a growing interest in and funding for neuroscience. There are so many resources and institutes where we can pursue questions that were really unthinkable a few decades ago.
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Most of the cells in our brain are known as neurons that send electrical signals to themselves. And this process starts from the time of our birth. The main focus is on the part of the brain called the hippocampus, which plays a role in memory and emotion control. Maybe science failed to unravel this mystery.
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The brain, like other questions such as what happens after death, is something that takes a long time to study, analyze by scientists, but the enigma that all this contains is difficult to solve, what is said are theories simple is my opinion
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The functioning of the human brain is not yet fully understood. Most complex and mysterious thing in world science today is the human brain. Human brain weighs about one and a half kilograms, of which about one billion are neurons. There are doubts as to whether its mystery will ever be revealed.
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True, and I have also read in recent years that some researchers are starting to believe that the rest of the nervous system - outside of the brain - is also related to our experience of consciousness.
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I do not think that science will accept that they failed to decipher the mysteries of the brain, rather they say that they are on the way and increasingly close to achieving it, and as an example, they currently use a technique called neurophotonics, through which, they assure that will reveal the secrets of the deep brain. Science, when it does not win, equals, but never accepts a defeat.
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They need to research more on human brain because they were very close to success. Thank you.
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The brain of human is an amazing creature of God. It's really very hard to know the mysteries of human brain.
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Human brain is a mysterious creation of God. Our brain is more powerful than enormous super computer. I wish I could use total power of my brain!
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Our brain is so complicated. Allah shows his power by creating such powerful brain. It is very hard to discover any good analysis about our brain.
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The human brain is a magnificent expression of our Creator. Science falls short in some of its projects ...
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It is a mysterious thing that belongs to everyone. Everything is invented by someone from their brain, if we can use 100% of our brain bright days will come soon.
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Brain is a naturally created thing that cannot be modified, we remember, we think, we do all things with our brain.
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