The European Commission has selected the Human Brain Project
(HBP) as one of its Future and Emerging Technologies and will
send it up to €1.19b over ten years so it can build a
supercomputer capable of simulating the human brain. The HBP
wants to build a simulated brain because we don’t know enough
about our grey matter. The project’s web site says we lack even
a “casual understanding of the way [brain] events … produce
cognition and behaviour,” while more than a century of research
has yielded little understanding of “how changes in the synapses
between neurons help us to remember important events in our
past”. The project will require fundamental research, because as
its FAQ points out “With today’s technology, an exascale
computer capable of simulating a cellular-level model of the
whole human brain would probably consume about a Gigawatt –
billions of euros worth of electricity every year.“ Another
problem is that boffins behind the project think they’ll need
hundreds of exabytes of memory, rather more th