
Human Brain Project: $1.61 billion to achieve human brain emulation by 2024 - Anon84
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/05/henry-markram-and-human-brain-project.html
======
nkassis
<shameless_plug> "Jülich Katrin Amunts has begun work on a detailed atlas of
the brain which involved slicing one into 8,000 parts which were then
digitalized with a scanner."

The lab I work for is working with them on this project. Basically those
slices are taken at 10 microns and we are working on fixing some of the
problems (when you cut a brain that thin you end up with a lot of tears and
deformations) Then our lab is reassembling the slices (with algorithms)
realigning the slices so you can cut through the slices in any directions and
get the cross section of those slices and look at them.

Realignment of the 8000 slices can take weeks or more (depending on how many
cores you can run the stuff on) and is a rather complex process.

Here a link for those wanting more info:
<https://cbrain.mcgill.ca/tools/visualization>

Scroll to the bottom (well look at the whole page, brainbrowser is what I've
been working on). You can see a image of the interface and some of the slices.
I'll try to find a video of the project.

</shameless_plug>

~~~
apl
Impressive.

    
    
      > Basically those slices are taken at 10 microns and we are
      > working on fixing some of the problems (when you cut a
      > brain that thin you end up with a lot of tears and
      > deformations)
    

Can you talk about how you deal with the inherent deformations? I've spent
hundreds of hours on cryostats preparing rodent brain slices for
autoradiography, and getting usable ones at 15-20 microns is a painful
process. Should be even worse if you need to retain morphological
information...

~~~
nkassis
I'm probably not the best person to explain the whole process but I can put
you in contact with the person who's working on it. (My email is in my
profile).

I'll try to explain what I know: For the most major tears and breaks we've
actually had to fix them ourselves (Some were quite awefull, for example part
of the right hemisphere on one slice broke off and was put back upside down
;p). For the less major thing, they can be fixed by looking at the surrounding
slices, this is also how the slice are realigned, it's an iterative process
where you take chunks of slices and aligned them then increase the chunks etc.
At least that's what I gather. (Software developer talking about Brain imaging
stuff is a bad idea ;p)

EDIT: Also as for the morphological information I'm pretty sure that some of
it will be affected by the process but I don't know how much. Our interface
will provide the original and modified slices and a heat map of changes for
comparaison in those cases. I don't know how that can be avoided.

------
dodo53
One thing I always think about brain emulation/mind uploading/strong AI
research is we need an legal/ethical framework in place before we get there.

I still think it's far off, but not everyone does. If you believe
consciousness is a property of running a brain or sufficiently advanced brain
model, at what point are you allowed to stop running your model and it's not
murder of a sentient? At one point can a model claim rights?

Especially as their goal is to use it for drug tests.

Also, can you simulate a brain without a body or is say hormones/blood
sugar/nervous system not easily separable?

~~~
JabavuAdams
Of more concern to me would be control of my own consciousness uploads.

I don't believe that hell exists now, but it would certainly be possible to
create a technological hell if brain uploading and simulation is possible.

Torture is already horrific, but at least you can only be tortured to death
once. With brain simulation, it would be possible to torture someone again and
again and again.

~~~
hasenj
I don't believe/think that consciousness/awareness is a property that can
emerge from running a brain or a brain model.

But, even if it were: a computer simulating my brain will not be me; I will
not experience what _it_ experiences.

Suppose someone came from the future and claimed to be "me"; that is, 20 years
from now I will go to the past; or something like that. Let's call the future
me F and the present me P. I'm P, when P sees the color red, it's me who's
seeing it. But, when F sees the color red, P doesn't experience the same
thing. (it will experience it 20 years later, when it becomes F).

So if a clone of me experiences something; I won't experience it.

So if you upload my memories to a brain and then torture that brain, you
wouldn't be torturing me; you'd be torturing a machine that happens to have my
memories. In the same sense that if you clone me then torture my clone, he
will experience the pain; but I won't.

If I do experience the pain of my clones, then we (me and my clones) must be
telepathically communicating, or something like that, which, while
philosophically not impossible, it's not compatible with physicalism, which
you have to accept if you think consciousness can arise from running a brain
model. I say telepathy is not compatible with physicalism because telepathy
implies a super-natural communication between minds (where minds are implies
to be super-natural entities).

~~~
FlowerPower
Do you think it is OK for F or a brain mdoel to experience pain? As long as it
is not you who is feeling the pain, it is moral acceptable? Is that what you
are saying?

~~~
hasenj
Well no, of course not! (assuming a brain model does experience pain)

I'm just saying if this theoretical "virtual hell" does really happen, it will
be a computer hell, not a human hell.

Although I don't actually think a computer simulating a brain model will have
consciousness. However complex that simulation is, it's nothing more than
electrons flowing through a circuit, and this flow has no intrinsic meaning; I
have no reason to believe consciousness can arise from such a thing.

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dardila2
Before starting to evaluate claims that this model will replicate any human
behavior, I think it's important to consider the case of C. Elegans. It always
has exactly 302 neurons, and we know exactly how they connect to one another
(we know its connectome), yet the furthest models have gotten with replicating
its behavior is simplified, feedforward models of locomotion. In light of
this, it is very hard to believe that we will be able to reproduce the
behavior of 100 billion neurons which are constantly changing. This is not to
say that Blue Brain is not an immensely useful tool to develop knowledge about
the brain: it will be an excellent way to study what the implications of the
vast amounts of data we have collected about the brain. However, to claim that
the model will behave like a human brain seems like a stretch.

~~~
Devilboy
The c elegans models are better that you think. Which nematode behavior is not
able to be replicated by our models?

~~~
dardila2
I'm not familiar with your models, but I'd be delighted to learn more. Could
you post a link?

EDIT: I was going off this quote from an article by well known computational
neuroscientist Christof Koch: " Consider this sobering lesson: the roundworm
Caenorhabditis elegans is a tiny creature whose brain has 302 nerve cells.
Back in 1986, scientists used electron microscopy to painstakingly map its
roughly 6000 chemical synapses and its complete wiring diagram. Yet more than
two decades later, there is still no working model of how this minimal nervous
system functions.

Now scale that up to a human brain with its 100 billion or so neurons and a
couple hundred trillion synapses. Tracing all those synapses one by one is
close to impossible, and it is not even clear whether it would be particularly
useful, because the brain is astoundingly plastic, and the connection
strengths of synapses are in constant flux. Simulating such a gigantic neural
network model in the hope of seeing consciousness emerge, with millions of
parameters whose values are only vaguely known, will not happen in the
foreseeable future."

~~~
Devilboy
I'm not an expert so I could be wrong but over the last 10 years I've seen
many papers on various details and behaviors of the C. Elegans nervous system.
I agree we have a lot still to learn from it but we certainly seem to know
enough to simulate it accurately and get the same kinds of behaviors that we
see in the living worm. We've even been able to simulate much larger and more
complex systems like the fruitfly eye and direction-tracking system. I really
believe that all we need to have is the connectome and the rules it uses to
organize and change itself. We don't need to know EVERYTHING about it.

~~~
dardila2
The sense I get of it is that they can custom build neural network models of
various sub-circuits to produce certain behaviors, but no one has been able to
take the connectome and build a 302 neuron model that replicates any behavior.
Would you agree?

I've searched for quite a long time for something like this and talked to a
couple faculty members to no avail, so if you could turn up anything I would
be very happy to read about it.

I agree with you on your last point: we can replicate behavior without going
to a very low level of simulation. However, the case of C. elegans seems like
very strong evidence that the connectome and current knowledge of update rules
is not enough to create a model of an organism that replicates behavior.

~~~
Devilboy
I think you are correct, I can't seem to find anyone that's actually simulated
the complete nervous system and reproduce any behaviors.

------
rauljara
There are dozens of ethical concerns involved with created an artificial human
conscious. A completely selfish concern of mine is this: Once the hard work of
emulating a human brain is done, what's to stop the emulation from running at
10 or 100 (or many, many more) times as fast? If this is a human brain,
replete with arrogance, in what way wouldn't it be right to feel superior to
me? If you had the option of hiring normal speed brains vs ultra high speed
brains, which would you hire? How long would it take ultra high speed brains
to completely take over?

~~~
pavel_lishin
If you were running at 100x clock speed, how much interest would you have in
working for someone running in real-time? You'd receive project requirements,
comment on them and ask clarifying questions, and send them off... and receive
a response in four months, subjective time.

Then again, I suppose that was the state of the world until sometime in the
1800's, and people managed to get things done.

~~~
dodo53
I guess the goal would be to choose work where you don't rely on people at
slower clock speeds (say working on deep algorithm stuff - you can get low
latency connection to a library and research stuff 100x faster). Or you could
change your clock speed / put your consciousness on hold until slower-time
triggers mean you can do something productive, and then ramp up so that your
end of things happens very quickly.

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gnosis
Will this project "emulate" a human brain down to the subatomic level? Down to
even the atomic level?

Both are probably far too ambitious for this project. I'd even be quite
surprised if they managed to accurately simulate a brain down to a molecular
level.

What this sounds like is yet another attempt at a grossly simplified
simulation of a subset of what is actually going on in the brain.

It remains to be seen how useful this is, nevermind whether this will bring us
any closer to AI (how would you even measure the "intelligence" of a simulated
brain without any sensory organs or an ability to communicate?)

~~~
roel_v
Does it matter? As far as I know, we don't know yet what level we need to
simulate at to simulate consciousness. If it's at the molecular level and we
achieve that, who cares about the atomic level.

~~~
possibilistic
It likely relies on subatomic phenomena. The stochasticity of microtubules,
which certainly store state information (as do most components in the entire
cell) derives from quantum mechanical phenomena. In any case, unraveling the
molecular level details of the cell is the most astoundingly complex problem
humanity has yet faced.

We can't even model bacterial state (regulation, etc.) right now. I strongly
feel that we won't be solving this problem within our lifetimes. Probably not
even in a hundred years.

~~~
roel_v
Maybe, but do we know if this stochasticity is fundamental to our
consciousness? It may work just as well if we use random values from a lava
lamp. (I don't know, I'm just speculating).

I think we will solve it in the next 20 years or so, certainly while I'm alive
(I'm 30). Like I mentioned in another post, it's a great time to be alive.

------
apl
Main problem appears to be construct validity. If they're building a
computationally vast model based on impoverished data (i.e., a pre-selected
subset of current morphological/functional knowledge), nobody will be able to
determine whether its electrical behavior tells you anything at all about a
real brain.

More to the point: If they want to get this thing running within ten years,
they'll have to simplify at each step without knowing the potential
repercussions of each simplification. I thus find it disingenuous to call
their project a "model of the brain." It's an implementation of a very
specific reduction of neurobiological state of the art. Sure, that can be
useful, but only within strictly confined limits. You won't be able to do drug
tests on this thing -- so much _is_ certain.

~~~
TheEzEzz
Not too long ago it was Markram himself accusing another group of what you
accuse him of (oversimplification), [http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/11/henry-
markram-calls-ibm-cat...](http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/11/henry-markram-
calls-ibm-cat-scale-brain.html)

From what I've read about Blue Brain it appears that validation is a central
theme of their work. They are actively validating the small piece that they
have already built (the neocortical column).

------
MikeCapone
Not exactly the same thing, but this interested by this should check out the
Whole Brain Emulation Roadmap by Nick Bostrom and Anders Sanberg. Very
advanced and I didn't understand most of it, but it was still fascinating:

[http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/3...](http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/3853/brain-
emulation-roadmap-report.pdf)

------
dodo53
Also - if you're interested in background on systems biology - there's a broad
overview of UCLs biological modelling research group here
(<http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/10844/1/10844.pdf> [pdf]) - they've got a project
modelling the liver / blood-sugar-system.

Apparently the canonical example that has worked pretty well is a computer
model of the heart but I think it's a simpler organ in that it's mostly
electro-mechanical, without such a complicated chemical system
(<http://www.sciencemag.org/content/295/5560/1678.abstract> \- behind Science
paywall)

~~~
TheEzEzz
There is actually quite a ways to go before we have high fidelity macro models
of the heart in action. (The numerical research I do is closely related). 3D
fluid simulations are expensive. Hopefully the quasi-discreteness of the brain
reduces the computational requirements for a high fidelity simulation.

~~~
dodo53
Ha, that's funny, that model was the one UCL referenced in their kinda 'This
is possible' motivation. I find it all very interesting, but gave up after a
year as I felt like a lot of the models were going to be a bit flaky for the
next decade and that was a bit of a culture shock (I was a physics student
before).

------
giardini
Is there any reason why they'll end up with a human brain instead of a
lizard's? And what about teaching it? A human brain requires a human body to
learn.

This is cargo-cult science. They'll be lucky to end up with anything useful,
except 20 years' government funding!8-)) This project could be almost as good
a gravy train for researchers as Cyc (20 years without significant results and
still funded).

~~~
apl

      > Is there any reason why they'll end up with a human
      > brain instead of a lizard's?
    

Don't accuse people of cargo-cult science without a basic understanding of
brain anatomy. There are vast differences in physiology and anatomy between
mammalian and primate brains, let alone the CNS of a lizard. Also, nobody's
_growing_ a brain here -- they're building a mature forebrain.

------
jasongullickson
It would be neat, and perhaps useful as a diagnostic tool (for troubleshooting
the real thing) but I'm not sure how emulating the brain has any practical
application (they are fairly common and inexpensive to acquire through natural
means).

I'm not saying I wouldn't love to burn billions of OPM building one, but then
again practicality is rarely a requirement for me personally.

~~~
ignifero
It's still extremely difficult to observe network activity in vivo. Even the
most sophisticated methods can only observe tiny fractions and only a single
property of neurons at a time. A large scale in silico network makes it
trivial to tinker with properties of cells and neurotransmitters and observe
how the activity of the network changes

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csomar
Interesting discussion here, but I just want to highlight one point:
consciousness happens not because of the brain, but actually of his
interaction with the external world.

So Designing a brain won't make consciousness. If constructing a brain model
needs $1.61Bn, then constructing the virtual world might need a dozen and may
be more. After that, uploading a brain copy to the brain computer and a world
copy to the world computer will create a real person like you.

No one actually can prove his existence. We are a bunch of mixed senses. And
since this can be a stimulation, we can't prove that we are real and we do
exist. Certainly, you can know who is behind you (and probably there is
someone); but only by committing suicide.

But an interesting question that pops in my mind: Does our world allow more
than one self-awareness existence? That is, if I upload my mind to a computer
which is stimulating my same world, wouldn't it be me?

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thisisblurry
I was kinda hoping that this would be a Kickstarter project.

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kwamenum86
Does the mythical man month principle extend to money? That is to say does
throwing twice as much money at a problem make it take half as long? Not being
critical. Just seems like budgeting a huge hunk of money to make something
happen more quickly might not be the best decision.

------
mgdiaz
A friend of mine is directing a 10-year film-in-the-making chronicling the
development of Markram's research.

Here's Year One of the project: <http://vimeo.com/8977365>

------
ozziegooen
If it's estimated to cost $1.61 billion to achieve emulation by 2024, we
should spend $160 billion and get it done by 2016. I'm skeptical, but a
technological singularity is not to be underestimated.

~~~
CamperBob
Science does not work that way

------
spottiness
This is good stuff. I'm surprised he didn't mention Roger Penrose and Stuart
Hameroff's work on quantum consciousness. If Penrose/Stuart are right (that a
lot, if not most, of the computation in the brain takes place in the
microtubules of each neuron, taking the complexity of the brain to unfathomed
territory) all these models of the brain based on the network of neuron
connections, will be basically irrelevant.

<http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/Google_000.htm>

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pygy_
As far as I know they use adult brains as models. A functional brain has
"meaningful synapses", i.e. neuronal assemblies that represent a given
concept, shape, etc... .

Getting these out of the box is impossible AFAIK, because of the sheer number
of neurons and connections to relate to one another. Especially, since the
neural code is far from being decrypted.

You'd have to replicate the development process, probably starting with a
model of fetal brain.

Is there anyone familiar with the research around? Are these concerns
baseless? If not, how are they addressed?

------
Locke1689
Let's be clear on at least one thing: they're building a simulation of _the
physical brain hardware._ At least according to the article, there is no goal
to simulate human _consciousness._

~~~
eschulte
Your consciousness is your brain hardware. The software exists in the neuronal
connections and weights (both of which change over the course of your
lifetime), and if these are taken from a real brain (presumably the brain
that's been sliced and scanned) then the resulting simulation _will_ be
conscious. Specifically the consciousness of the dead person whose brain was
used as the model for the simulation.

That is unless you are not a materialist, i.e., you believe that the mind is
the product of some non-physical plane that somehow interacts with the
physical world through the brain...

~~~
apl
Non-materialism isn't as far-fetched as you make it out to be. In fact, no
materialist account has managed to give a plausible explanation of how
subjectivity and qualia emerge from physical substrates. Not so far, at least.

See David Chalmers, among others.

EDIT: Really? Downvotes?

~~~
khafra
The short version, without references or argumentation:

Science can't prove that there aren't any supernatural requirements for a
sentient mind.

However, Science has proven that most of our intuitions about our own
cognition are wrong.

Since intuition is the only evidence we have that subjectivity and qualia can
arise from mysterious nonphysical processes but not computational, physical
processes, Occam's Razor demands that we accept the explanation which accords
with proven laws of physics.

------
sfjunk
How are they handling the fact that a human brain simply won't work if they
don't have sensory input (eyes,ears,touch, ,...,BREATHING)

------
tedkimble
Everyone in the comments seems to be quickly attributing consciousness
directly to a sufficiently connected deterministic system. This seems to
guarantee a deterministic view of life, which I find troubling.

Have any of you thought of the role of the nodes themselves? I find Stewart
Kauffman's recent work intriguing [PDF]:
<http://stuartkauffman.com/index_25_1612352741.pdf>

~~~
ak217
That author, like everyone else I've ever heard argue against the basic
connectionism/neurobiology first principles model, takes a bit of biology, a
bit of physics, and then throws in philosophical crap that has nothing to do
with science, engineering, or any reasonable way to analytically understand
the brain. This mixing of science and navel-gazing is useless.

------
erikig
If it were my own cash, I'd wait until a couple years and buy the desktop
version of the human brain for 1,600.00.

------
car
The question that pops in to my mind is, how could we model a human brain,
while we still have no clear idea how it works?

There are many many unknown genes and pathways involved in brain development
and function. So without knowing these details, how would one go about
'emulating' a brain.

edit:[removed snark]

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d0m
I often dream about "building" a digital human brain (Not that I have the
knowledge to do it.. just for the sake of dreaming about it :p) That'd be
fantastic.. think about all the advancement in the medical resources.. Being
able to "simulate" a real-world scenario.

~~~
pavel_lishin
"Good morning, Virtual Patient 2872. Sure, we can call you d0m if you'd like.
Today, we'll be testing out a new suite of anti-schizophrenic medications.
Please describe how you are feeling, in detail, so we may shut you down and
try another variation."

~~~
nooneelse
If you set the Virtual Patient software to run with less than several square
km of simulated environment or in low resolution mode, then you need to be
sure and run the "defiant VP detector and shutdown routine" so as to avoid
generating reams and reams of vitriolic rants mostly involving violations of
human dignity. You can just filter those out of the data-set later if you
want, but the d0m patient has a rather high defiance ratio, so better to shut
the unhelpful instances down early and not waste the computation up-front.

------
Coko
Chatroulette with bots coming soon.

------
givan
This means that they figured out how the brain works? I doubt it

------
ignifero
It's sad to see a discussion that could be of interest to computer hackers
(the current neurosimulation software is decades old, horrible and could
really benefit from some new ideas) ending up to the usual blah blah about
self aware robots that will take over the earth. /signoff

------
mkramlich
For bonus credit, the brain emulation must be written in JS and run in a
browser.

------
sv123
Maybe we are all already living in a digital brain simulation.

~~~
zackattack
[http://blog.bekahbrunstetter.com/wp-
content/uploads/2011/03/...](http://blog.bekahbrunstetter.com/wp-
content/uploads/2011/03/PBF111-Reset.jpg)

