Mouse brain simulated on computer

BBC NEWS | Technology | Mouse brain simulated on computer

As a Buddhist and a tech-geek I’m really excited to hear that a team from IBM Almaden Research Lab and the University of Nevada created a simulation of half of a mouse brain, which means that the supercomputer had virtually recreated 8,000 neurons and the many thousands of connections between them.

The experiment demanded so much computer power that it could only run at 1/10 of the rate of activity in a real mouse brain, and since it ran for only 10 seconds it amounted to recreating one second of mouse-brain activity.

The team saw the groups of neurons form spontaneously into groups. They also saw nerves in the simulated synapses firing in a ways similar to the staggered, co-ordinated patterns seen in nature.

The researchers say that although the simulation shared some similarities with a mouse’s mental make-up in terms of nerves and connections it lacked the structures seen in real mice brains.

This strikes me as being an enormous step toward creating artificial consciousness. This mouse-brain simulation could probably be said to have been conscious during its 10 seconds of activity.

If we can simulate half a mouse brain this year, what will we be able to do next year? And how long before we can simulate a human brain?

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