3D Computer Stimulation of Human Brain

The Blue Brain project is a collaboration of IBM, the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, or EPFL, in Lausanne, Switzerland, and others. The project is an attempt to create a blueprint of the human brain to advance cognition research.

Last year, EPFL bought a multimillion-dollar model of IBM's Blue Gene/L supercomputer for the two-year project, which is being conducted in Switzerland. The group only recently simulated the firing of 10,000 neurons in a single column in the neocortex, the largest area of the human brain governing high-level thinking and action. (A column typically contains 100,000 neurons.)

A computer simulation of 10,000 neurons firing in the human brain produces a terabyte of data--a fraction of what it would take to map the brain's billions of neurons in algorithms.

The announcement was made at Cognitive Computing conference, a two-day gathering hosted by IBM's Almaden Institute.

Read the full story on this conference by clicking here .