The Human Brain Project plans to build a high fidelity virtual
model of a workinghuman brain, modeling aspects of the brain
including neuron connections, blood flow,and even the behavior
of individual neurons, down to the level of ion channels.
Theproject will be lead be Henry Markram, a scientist at the
Swiss Federal Instituteof Technology. They already have a
prototype in place. The project's goal is to include every
aspectof brain biology, including thousands of discoveries made
in the past decade. Of course,a real human brain has immense
computing power, so the virtual model would in effectrun in
super slow motion. Each computational step in the computer model
would be onlybe a tiny slice of "real" virtual time. The virtual
model will be used for everything from modeling the behavior of
new drugsto better understanding of strokes and other brain
injuries. Perhaps the most amazing part of this ambitious plan
is to provide the virtual brainsensory input from a virtual
world, one in which human scientists mi