Polynomial

Another interesting article published in Scientific American yesterday, giving an account of the “headway” (no pun intended) being made in understanding the human brain and how it works…

Neuron columns...

When hackers want to break into a computer system, they often attempt to reverse engineer the operating software to better understand how it works (and, of course, its vulnerabilities). While researchers have for years taken a similar approach to better understanding parts of our gray matter, neuroscientists now say that within a decade it will be possible to create a digital model that replicates all functions of the human brain.

Though the brain has trillions of synapses, billions of neurons, millions of proteins, and thousands of genes, scientists have already begun to build detailed models of the mouse, rat, cat, primate and human brain, says Henry Markram, director of neuroscience and technology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, where he founded the Brain Mind Institute (BMI) in 2002. One of the keys to furthering this work is cooperation among scientists who are gathering together fragments of information collected over the past century about the how the brain works.

Such a model would reside on a supercomputer, allowing researchers to test theories about the brain and better understand how electrical-magnetic-chemical patterns in this mysterious organ convert into our perceptions. “We think we see with our eyes, but in fact most of what we ’see’ is generated as a projection by your brain,” Markram said in a statement. “So what are we actually looking at when we look at something ‘outside’ of us?”

…continued here…

Sort of heralds the coming of A.I., an idea contained within Clarke and Kubrick’s masterpiece, “2001: A Space Odyssey“…