This is mental. Some researchers at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland are developing a gigantic simulation of a human brain, down to level of individual neurons and synapses, on a Blue Gene/L IBM supercomputer. The Blue Brain Project
has been going since this time last year, when we first wrote about it
Anyway, they've just finished simulating 10,000 neurons in a single column of the neocortex. And what's more, they've created visualisation software that lets you watch the neurons firing as if you were inside this part of the brain. "It immediately allows us to assess the value of the data, to discern if this something we want to save and analyze later," said project member Henry Markham to CNET. "It's also a lot of fun."
The researchers are currently looking for more funding and Markham even suggests that one day it'll be possible to simulate the billions of neurons that make up the entire human brain. That may be so, but I'm not convinced that this, on its own, will be capable of anything approaching human intelligence.