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Blue Brain Project
The Blue Brain Project was a Swiss brain research initiative that aimed to create a digital reconstruction of the mouse brain. The project was founded in May 2005 by the Brain Mind Institute of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. The project ended in December 2024. Its mission was to use biologically detailed digital reconstructions and simulations of the mammalian brain to identify the fundamental principles of brain structure and function.
The project was headed by the founding director Henry Markram—who also launched the European Human Brain Project—and was co-directed by Felix Schürmann, Adriana Salvatore and Sean Hill. Using a Blue Gene supercomputer running Michael Hines's NEURON, the simulation involved a biologically realistic model of neurons and an empirically reconstructed model connectome.
There were a number of collaborations, including the Cajal Blue Brain, which is coordinated by the Supercomputing and Visualization Center of Madrid (CeSViMa), and others run by universities and independent laboratories.
In 2006, the project made its first model of a neocortical column with simplified neurons. In November 2007, it completed an initial model of the rat neocortical column. This marked the end of the first phase, delivering a data-driven process for creating, validating, and researching the neocortical column.
Neocortical columns are considered by some researchers to be the smallest functional units of the neocortex, and they are thought to be responsible for higher functions such as conscious thought. In humans, each column is about 2 mm (0.079 in) in length, has a diameter of 0.5 mm (0.020 in) and contains about 60,000 neurons. Rat neocortical columns are very similar in structure but contain only 10,000 neurons and 108 synapses.
In 2009, Henry Markram claimed that a "detailed, functional artificial human brain can be built within the next 10 years". He conceived the Human Brain Project, to which the Blue Brain Project contributed, and which became funded in 2013 by the European Union with up to $1.3 billion.
In 2015, the project simulated part of a rat brain with 30,000 neurons. Also in 2015, scientists at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) developed a quantitative model of the previously unknown relationship between the neurons and the astrocytes. This model describes the energy management of the brain through the function of the neuro-glial vascular unit (NGV). The additional layer of neuron and glial cells is being added to Blue Brain Project models to improve functionality of the system.
In 2017, Blue Brain Project discovered that neural cliques connected to one another in up to eleven dimensions. The project's director suggested that the difficulty of understanding the brain is partly because the mathematics usually applied for studying neural networks cannot detect that many dimensions. The Blue Brain Project was able to model these networks using algebraic topology.
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Blue Brain Project
The Blue Brain Project was a Swiss brain research initiative that aimed to create a digital reconstruction of the mouse brain. The project was founded in May 2005 by the Brain Mind Institute of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. The project ended in December 2024. Its mission was to use biologically detailed digital reconstructions and simulations of the mammalian brain to identify the fundamental principles of brain structure and function.
The project was headed by the founding director Henry Markram—who also launched the European Human Brain Project—and was co-directed by Felix Schürmann, Adriana Salvatore and Sean Hill. Using a Blue Gene supercomputer running Michael Hines's NEURON, the simulation involved a biologically realistic model of neurons and an empirically reconstructed model connectome.
There were a number of collaborations, including the Cajal Blue Brain, which is coordinated by the Supercomputing and Visualization Center of Madrid (CeSViMa), and others run by universities and independent laboratories.
In 2006, the project made its first model of a neocortical column with simplified neurons. In November 2007, it completed an initial model of the rat neocortical column. This marked the end of the first phase, delivering a data-driven process for creating, validating, and researching the neocortical column.
Neocortical columns are considered by some researchers to be the smallest functional units of the neocortex, and they are thought to be responsible for higher functions such as conscious thought. In humans, each column is about 2 mm (0.079 in) in length, has a diameter of 0.5 mm (0.020 in) and contains about 60,000 neurons. Rat neocortical columns are very similar in structure but contain only 10,000 neurons and 108 synapses.
In 2009, Henry Markram claimed that a "detailed, functional artificial human brain can be built within the next 10 years". He conceived the Human Brain Project, to which the Blue Brain Project contributed, and which became funded in 2013 by the European Union with up to $1.3 billion.
In 2015, the project simulated part of a rat brain with 30,000 neurons. Also in 2015, scientists at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) developed a quantitative model of the previously unknown relationship between the neurons and the astrocytes. This model describes the energy management of the brain through the function of the neuro-glial vascular unit (NGV). The additional layer of neuron and glial cells is being added to Blue Brain Project models to improve functionality of the system.
In 2017, Blue Brain Project discovered that neural cliques connected to one another in up to eleven dimensions. The project's director suggested that the difficulty of understanding the brain is partly because the mathematics usually applied for studying neural networks cannot detect that many dimensions. The Blue Brain Project was able to model these networks using algebraic topology.