"We need the simulator for at least two reasons. In Europe alone, brain diseases affect 180 million people, or roughly one in three—a number that is set to grow as the population ages. At the same time, pharmaceutical companies are not investing in new treatments for the ailing nervous system. A holistic view of the brain would enable us to reclassify such diseases in biological terms rather than looking at them simply as sets of symptoms. The breadth of this perspective would allow us to move forward to develop a generation of treatments that selectively target the underlying abnormalities.A Countdown to a Digital Simulation of Every Last Neuron in the Human Brain: Scientific American
The second reason is that computing is fast approaching barriers to further development. Computers cannot do many tasks that animal brains do effortlessly, despite the inexorable increase in processing power. For instance, although computer scientists have made huge progress in visual recognition, the machines still struggle to make use of context in a scene or to use arbitrary scraps of information to predict future events in the way the brain can."
Friday, June 15, 2012
A Countdown to a Digital Simulation of Every Last Neuron in the Human Brain: Scientific American