[ad_1]
Although it is possible to record all the points in all neurons at once, he believes that the brain is not isolated: in order to connect the points properly, the brain would have to record external stimuli at once. , as well as the behavior of the organism. And he argued that we need to understand the brain at the macroscopic level before decoding what the shooting of individual neurons means.
Others were concerned about the impact of centralizing control over these areas. Cornelia Bargmann, a neuroscientist at Rockefeller University, was concerned about whether she would scare off research led by individual researchers. (Bargmann was soon picked up to lead the BRAIN Initiative team).
There is not a single agreed-upon theory of how the brain works, and not everyone in this field agreed that building the simulated brain was the best way to study it.
While the U.S. initiative sought the input of scientists to steer its direction, the EU project was top-down, led by Markram. As Noah Hutton documents in the 2020 film Silico-n, Markram’s grand plans were soon clarified. As he was studying for a degree in neuroscience, he was instructed to read Hutton Markram’s articles and was impressed by his proposals to simulate the human brain; when he started making documentaries, he decided to chronicle the effort. He soon realized, however, that he was differentiated by a billion-dollar business struggle and changing goals than by the advanced sciences.
Silico-n shows Markram a charismatic leader who had to make bold claims about the future of neuroscience in order to attract funding to pursue his unique vision. But from the beginning the project was concerned with a serious problem: there is no single and agreed theory of brain functioning, and not everyone in the field agreed that building a simulated brain was the best way to study it. It didn’t take long for these differences to emerge in the EU project.
In 2014, hundreds of experts from across Europe wrote a letter outlining concerns about oversight, funding mechanisms and transparency Human Brain Project. Scientists believed Markram’s goal was premature and too narrow and would reject funding for researchers looking for other ways to study the brain.
“What surprised me was that if you were successful and your brain turned on and simulated, what did you learn?” Terry Sejnowski, a computational neuroscientist at the Salk Institute and a member of the advisory committee for the BRAIN Initiative, told me. “Simulation is as complicated as the brain.”
The board of directors of the Human Brain Project voted to change its organization and management in early 2015, replacing the three-member executive committee headed by Markram with a 22-member governing board. Christoph Ebell, a Swiss activist with a track record in science diplomacy, has been appointed executive director. “When I took office, the project was at a crisis point,” he says. “People were clearly wondering if the project would go ahead.”
A few years later he was also out, after a “strategic disagreement” with the project’s host organization. The project is now focused on providing new computational research infrastructure to help neuroscientists store, process, and analyze large amounts of data — a problem in the field of non-systematic data collection — and develops software to create 3D brain atlases and simulations.
The US BRAIN initiative, on the other hand, had its changes. Initially, in 2014, in response to the concerns of scientists and acknowledging the limitations of what was possible, it became something more pragmatic. developing brain probing technologies.
New day
These changes have finally begun to bear fruit, even if they are not what the creators of the big brain projects initially envisioned.
Last year, it was released by the Human Brain Project A 3D digital map that integrates different aspects of the organization of the human brain at the millimeter and micrometer level. It’s basically Google Earth for the brain.
[ad_2]
Source link
