
Why the Human Brain Project Went Wrong and How to Fix It - wrongc0ntinent
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-the-human-brain-project-went-wrong-and-how-to-fix-it/
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freshhawk
This passage really distills it down to the essence of what happened:

"Despite skepticism in the neuroscience community, Markram won over the people
who really mattered: funders at the European Commission, who seem to have
looked less closely at the proposal's scientific feasibility than at its
potential economic and political payoff."

~~~
joe_the_user
Given the limited understanding of neuroscience and the problems of Markram's
vision, the whole affair had the earmarks of a doomed project.

One can see similar problems in smaller effort by Palm Founder Jeff Hawkin's
efforts to jump-start algorithmically oriented neuroscience research with his
book On Intelligence and his company Numenta.

With all the failures pretty visible now, I'd like to say I think there's some
validity in seeing if one can extract a broad vision out of all the disparate
threads of neuroscience research.

There have been events in the history of science when outsiders walked in and
saw a forest instead of a lot of trees - see Craig Venter, Alfred Wegener and
others (and there have been many more cranks who claimed to the same of
course). Making _some_ effort to see if that kind of approach can gel is worth
some effort in the study of the brain, a field whose complexity is so huge
that gradual, iterative research could continue in places for a thousand years
and not answer basic questions.

~~~
plonh
It is interesting that after Numenta's flop we have Google Brain and the
academic neural net community deploying amazing successes.

~~~
astazangasta
These two things have nothing to do with each other. Deep learning, despite
the use of the world "neural", has nothing to do with neuroscience, and
mapping the human brain is not the same as making an artificial neural
network.

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streptomycin
I was never satisfied with their explanation for why they had to start with
the human brain rather than the brain of a MUCH simpler organism like C.
elegans.

~~~
Houshalter
Because it's unlikely that C. elegans can't even _learn_. It doesn't have any
brain structures equivalent to ones in humans. It's neurons work totally
differently. They are so different from us that anything we learn probably
wouldn't apply to human brains. A more intelligent animal, ideally a mammal,
would be a much better choice.

~~~
foobarian
The thing I was always wondering about brain simulations is how to determine
what level of detail is enough. What if neurons evolved to take advantage of
some funny quantum phenomena that we may not even know about yet, and without
this the simulation won't work? For this reason I would think that getting a
simple brain simulation to work would at least help enumerate the physics most
involved in their function.

Now maybe there is some extra physics that comes into play at scale (like some
quantum-computery effect with human-size brains that induces conciousness) but
maybe this would be detectable as small discrepancies in the small simulations
(especially as they progress in size to e.g. mice).

~~~
sanxiyn
Since brain has to work in a noisy environment, it is unlikely its function
depends too much on details. Neurons can't depend on effects we don't know
about, because if effect is large, we would know about it, and if effect is
small, brain has to work with noise that size, so it is not necessary for us
to get it right for its function. (It's a different matter for its exact
output, but that's for later.)

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amatic
John Cleese, of all people, summarized our current knowledge of the nervous
system best in this video:
[https://youtu.be/FQjgsQ5G8ug?t=20](https://youtu.be/FQjgsQ5G8ug?t=20)

We are clueless. A lot of what is published is just neurobabble, even in
'serious' journals. As others have pointed out, we still don't even know how
to simulate a brain of a tiny worm with 302 neurons. Talking about simulating
billions of neurons is beyond fantasy, and funding such a projects is.. well..
not surprising from politicians, but that is another matter.

Similarly, a lot of scientists are researching themes like 'consciousness' and
'executive functions' and still don't know how to make a robot walk like a
normal person on two feet. We should be concentrating on trying to understand
the simple stuff - the reflex arc, muscle control, grasping, and pointing a
finger toward something.

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aggerdmon
[Ok, I just saw in another one of you're posts your MA involved perceptual
control theory, so yah, right on. I have this written already and feel a
little silly now, but I figure the links are good and worth posting.]

I am finishing up my undergraduate right now in psychology, and while I want
to defend the work that is being done by cognitive psychologists on concepts
at higher levels of abstraction (Many researchers working in more mathematical
areas of psychology tend towards working on things like consciousness,
perception, concepts and categorization. There are cool advances in it, but I
won't go too much into it in this post. I guess I'm just trying to say that
you end up working with constructs that have higher barriers of entry to
communicating outside of groups of researchers who get excited about modeling
and the perceptual measurement theory.) I digress with that though. The main
reason I wanted to comment is that your comment on understanding things like
pointing hit on one of my favorite areas of psychology that has tragically
always been somewhat nitch, but provides a lot of interesting connections
between different areas if you take the time to get into it. There is a thread
in the field of psychology that does just this kind of research, termed
sometimes ecological psychology. It is often referred to colloquially as
Gibsonian psychology, termed after [JJ
Gibson]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_J._Gibson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_J._Gibson))
who is seen as the father of the field(its practitioner's are known
colloquially as Gibsonians).

I was lucky enough to take the Geoffrey Bingham's (who specializes reach to
grasp behavior iirc) Perception/Action course a few years back, and found it
immensely rewarding.* The primary text for the course was JJ Gibson's classic
book "The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception". The philosophical
foundations of gibsons theory of affordances is to take a realist approach to
perception. (Avoiding the troubles that mind-body dualism imposes; taking a
more Heidegerrian approach). The classic mantra of the field is ask not what
is in you're mind, but what you're mind is in. I wish I had time to say more
now, but I need to run here. But I'll leave you with a few snippets of what I
took away from the course, and some links I think you'll enjoy, and can
furnish more if you would be interested.

The Archival Gibson Video Series (Whoever assembled these had perfect choice
in music)

[Reversibility and event
perception]([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwVLny6Ymsk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwVLny6Ymsk))

[Optical Transitions:Visible To
Invisible]([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qQLtIICXoE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qQLtIICXoE))

[Motion Paralax and Percieved
Depth]([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVSaWXqQh0w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVSaWXqQh0w))

Disclaimer I haven't watched this video, but the idea that perception of
throw-ability may explain size weight illusions is a surprising one.

[Geoff Bingham - Haptics: throwing and the size-weight
illusion]([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud9JB4NYUvA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud9JB4NYUvA))

* I really need to digitize those notes...

Btw: Awesome Arm.

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paulsutter
Like any project, I'm sure there are many ways it can be improved.

Still, I'd much rather see $1B spent imperfectly on something important - a
thousand times over - rather than a trillion plus on the F-35, or so many of
the ways governments spend money.

~~~
simonh
No results from a wahatever effort is still axwaste no matter how wonderful
the payoff might have been. This goes to the heart of why efforts like this
get funding in the first place. The funding committees get blinded by the
bright light of the potential payoff, and the money gets wasted instead of
going to fund and actualy deliver valuable projects that aren't as glitzy. But
at least you would have ended up with a real actual benefit.

~~~
IanCal
> No results from a wahatever effort is still axwaste no matter how wonderful
> the payoff might have been.

That's easy to say with hindsight. No results from putting money into
something doesn't mean you made the wrong choice. That might be the case here,
but as a general statement it's really quite dangerously wrong.

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ktRolster
IBM started questioning their funding of the project because of the lack of a
success criteria.

It's cool that you have many calculations running in parallel on a super
computer, and each calculation is a simplified model of a neuron, but how do
you know when you've actually replicated a brain? A brain is more than a
collection of neurons, they need to be connected and do something.

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Gatsky
In the current era, technological advances are far more important to progress
in the life sciences than ideas or analytical/computational methods. The cycle
of innovation is quite fast. The human genome project is a classic example.
Celera genomics came out with a a totally new DNA sequencing technology
towards the end of the HGP, and managed to sequence the human genome in a
fraction of the time. It so happens that the HGP had enough of a head start to
release their data at the same time, and that their data and Celera's data
were complementary in many ways. But imagine if the HGP started 5 years later,
and Celera released their complete genome when HGP had only done 50%? It too
would be considered a grand failure.

A grand project needs to be timed very carefully. Even the ones that actually
work well will be obsolete by their completion unless they happen to occur in
the right part of the technology cycle.

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g7635629
I think this is the Spanish talkshow mentioned in the post which is quite a
tl;dr for what went wrong with HBP

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhsZll_P1iA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhsZll_P1iA)

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skimpycompiler
_A 10 part documentary is being made by film director Noah Hutton, with each
installment detailing the year-long workings of the project at the EPFL.
Having started filming in 2009, the documentary is planned to be released in
2020, after the years of filming and editiang have finished. Regular
contributions from Henry Markram and the rest of the team provide an insight
into the Blue Brain Project, while similar research tasks across the world are
touched on._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Brain_Project#Documentary](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Brain_Project#Documentary)

This is going to be very interesting.

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Moshe_Silnorin
>While he was still in Germany, his son Kai had been diagnosed with autism. As
he told The Guardian in 2013, he wanted “to be able to step inside a
simulation of my son's brain and see the world as he sees it.”

This is a beautiful sentiment.

~~~
taneq
Or terrifying, if you consider that a simulation of his son's brain _is_ , in
a very real sense, his son. And that when he shuts that simulation down he's
killing it.

~~~
orbifold
The Human Brain Project does not actually try to create a realistic human
brain, instead it tries to randomly generate neurons and synapses whose
statistical distribution matches those of the different kinds of neurons
observed in the human brain. While this is utterly useless for things like
intelligence or learning (both of which are wildly unrealistic given the
simulation speed of the software system), for things like autism, parkinson
which go along with abnormally distributed brain patterns it could still be
very useful. I think beyond the fact that Markram probably oversold the
project, the project also suffers from a clash of cultures. In fields physics
and other branches of natural science it has long been a given to do
simulations instead of experiments once one was reasonably sure how things
worked. In the case of the Human Brain Project if the software is architected
in the right way additional insights in how synapses and neurons worked and
how they are connected could be incorporated over time. Obviously you wouldn't
understand conciousness or learning this way, at least not right away, but
solely relying on experiments, won't get you there either, since they can only
deal with dozens of neurons and not much more.

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rasz_pl
TLDR:

800 scientists: We Jelly JO! How come one asshole gets 1.3B euro for his
project and can decide how to spend it? Lets collectively shit on him.

There is no substantive critique cited in this article, only scientists
whining about management structure.

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hyperion2010
I might go so far as to say that the issue isn't with the management structure
so much as the complete lack of a management structure. It takes a well run
and managed organization to spend a billion euros effectively.

