"Markram is not holding his breath, waiting for some emergent consciousness to arise from the silicon brain. What he is after is something more prosaic, but also a lot more useful than a talking machine. By understanding the function of the brain, we can also begin to understand its dysfunction.
Disorders such as depression, schizophrenia and dementia are the price we pay for having complicated brains. 'We don't understand what goes wrong inside those circuits,' says Markram. 'We're still in empirical medicine. If a drug compound works: good. If not, we try another one.' Blue Brain could accelerate experimentation tremendously. It will be much more efficient than wet-lab experiments and it will reduce animal experimentation.
However, Steven Rose, emeritus professor of biology at the Open University, is sceptical that a biologically accurate model of the entire human brain can be built, given our current state of knowledge and technology. The integration between the different regions of the brain is just too complex to recreate on a computer simulation. 'I'm not against people playing with models,' says Rose, 'but the idea that you can use it for anything very sophisticated as opposed to looking at real animals with real behaviour at the moment seems to me to be pie in the sky.'"
Lab comes one step closer to building artificial human brain | Technology | The Guardian:
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