Simulated brain closer to thought

A detailed simulation of a small region of a brain built molecule by molecule has been constructed and has recreated experimental results from real brains.

Scaling the simulation to the human brain is only a matter of money, says the project's head.

While many computer simulations have attempted to code in "brain-like" computation or to mimic parts of the nervous systems and brains of a variety of animals, the Blue Brain project was conceived to reverse-engineer mammal brains from real laboratory data and to build up a computer model down to the level of the molecules that make them up.

"It starts to learn things and starts to remember things. We can actually see when it retrieves a memory, and where they retrieved it from because we can trace back every activity of every molecule, every cell, every connection and see how the memory was formed."