On July 22, 2009, the neuroscientist Henry Markram walked onstage at the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford, England, and told the audience that he was going to simulate the human brain, in all its staggering complexity, in a computer. His goals were lofty: โItโs perhaps to understand perception, to understand reality, and perhaps to even also understand physical reality.โ His timeline was ambitious: โWe can do it within 10 years.โ
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Itโs been exactly 10 years. He did not succeed.
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Markramโs claims are worth revisiting for two reasons. First, the stakes were huge: In 2013, the European Commission awarded his initiativeโthe Human Brain Project (HBP)โa staggering 1 billion euro grant (worth about $1.42 billion at the time). Second, the HBPโs efforts, and the intense backlash to them, exposed important divides in how neuroscientists think about the brain and how it should be studied.
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The HBP, then, is in a very odd position, criticized for being simultaneously too grandiose and too narrow. None of the skeptics I spoke with was dismissing the idea of simulating parts of the brain, but all of them felt that such efforts should be driven by actual research questions.ย
Read full, original post: The Human Brain Project Hasnโt Lived Up to Its Promise
