A scientist receives 1,000 million euros to create a replica of the human brain

The neurologist Henry Markram has got a contribution of 1,000 million euros granted by the European Commission (EC) to try to get an artificial brain that recreates the human brain. In 2009, at the TED Conference in Oxford, Markram announced its intention to create an artificial intelligence that recrease the human brain and place it in a supercomputer that discurriese independently, as a person. Dr. Markram is convinced that if science has not yet managed to simulate a human brain is so true"lack of ambition". Thus, he is convinced to simulate the functions of 86,000 million in the human brain neurons and 100 trillion connections established. Once built the artificial brain, it would be possible to ascertain the causes of brain disorders or birth to a new generation of robots and smart technologies. Markram believes that with today's technology it is possible to faithfully recreate the behavior of the human brain. His project has won the support of important figures such as Nobel laureate neuroscientist Torsten Wisley or co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim of Sun Microsystems. The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne has seen future Markram investigations in recent years. There has been recreated along with a group of 15 postdoctoral researchers, the behavior of a portion of a million neurons in the neocortex of the rat to be simulated by the IBM Blue Gene supercomputer. Markram research does not warrant that this recreation can scale to a full brain and even less that can get to rebuild a human brain, much more complex. Also, if it were to simulate the human brain with fidelity, there is no certainty that actually behave like a human brain does. In this sense, Markram says that "the only way to find out there that's building it." Markram has convinced and involved in some way to 6,000 researchers and now is when will the test of fire. Earlier this year, the European Commission decided to grant 1,300 million dollars (1,005 million euros) to develop their project. Professor of Caltech Chrostof Koch, chief scientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, believes, however, that " there are too many things we do not know yet." As an example, he notes that "the caterpillar of earth has exactly 302 neurons, and yet we have no idea of how this animal".