neuroecology
Behold, The Blue Brain
19
The Blue Brain project releases their first major paper today and boy, it’s a doozy. Including supplements, it’s over 100 pages long, including 40 figures and 6 tables. In order to properly understand everything in the paper, you have to go back and read a bunch of other papers they have released over their years that detail their methods. This is not a scientific paper: it’s a goddamn philosophical treatise on The Nature of Neural Reconstruction.
The Blue Brain Project – or should I say Henry Markram? it is hard to say where the two diverge – aims to simulate absolutely everything in a complete mammalian brain. Except right now it sits at middle-ground: other simulations have replicated more neurons (Izhikevich had a model with 10^11 neurons of 21 subtypes). At the other extreme, MCell has completely reconstructed everything about a single neuron – down to the diffusion of single atoms – in a way that Blue Brain does not./.../
