Daily Blague

Don't expect me to be intelligible about it, but I've just got wind of The Blue Brain Project. And I've learned about an important brain structure of which I hadn't the least notion before opening the current Economist and reading about it. It's called the Neocortical Column (or NCC), and at the very least you have to check out the images at the Project's site. Shown here are "pyramidal neurons," about which the only intelligent thing that I have to say is that the top of the image is the outer edge of the brain. The structures are about 0.5 mm wide and 2 mm long. There are about a million of them in the brain, and each connects to about ten thousand nerve cells. The discovery of the NCC earned two scientists the Nobel Prize in 1981.

The Blue Brain Project is going to put the type of IBM supercomputer that is currently studying brain chemistry to work juggling digital simulations of an NCC. That's step one. It is believed that the rules governing NCC operation have been successfully captured in digital expressions; now these will be organized to simulate an actual NCC. According to The Economist's sources, the entire brain might be modeled in ten to fifteen years. Kathleen is not going to be happy when she reads about this, but, for the moment, I'm simply amazed. I had no idea that research had gotten this far.