Henry Markram has become famous as the creator of the world's most expensive brain simulation, but neuroscientists know him best for his pioneering experiments on synapses. Markram was one of the first to investigate the sequential version of Hebb's rule in a systematic way, by varying the time delay between the spiking of the two neurons when inducing synaptic plasticity. (Changes in the synapses, the connection points between cells. One scientist reduced Hebb’s rule to: “Cells that fire together, wire together.”) When I first heard Markram speak at a conference, I also encountered the chain-smoking and charming Alex Thomson, another prominent neuroscientist, who lectured about synapses with bubbling enthusiasm. She was in love with them, and wanted us to love them too. Markram, in contrast, came across as the high priest of synapses, summoning our awe and respect for their intricate mysteries.

In a 2009 lecture Markram promised a computer simulation of a human brain within ten years, a sound bite that traveled around the world. If you view the video of the lecture online, you might agree with me that his handsomely sculpted face looks a bit fierce, but his manner of speaking is gentle and inviting, with the quiet conviction of a visionary. He didn't sound so calm later that year. His competitor, the IBM researcher Dharmendra Modha, announced a simulation of a cat brain, after having claimed a mouse brain simulation in 2007. Markram responded with an angry letter to IBM's chief technology officer:

Dear Bernie,

You told me you would string this guy up by the toes the last time Mohda [sic] made his stupid statement about simulating the mouse's brain.

I thought that ... journalists would be able to recognize that what IBM reported is a scam - nowhere near a cat-scale brain simulation, but somehow they are totally deceived by these incredible statements.

I am absolutely shocked at this announcement .... I suppose it is up to me to let the "cat out of the bag" about this outright deception of the public.

Competition is great, but this is a disgrace and extremely harmful to the field. Obviously Mohda would like to claim he simulated the Human brain next-I really hope someone does some scientific and ethical checking up on this guy.

All the best,
Henry

Markram didn't keep his indignation secret. He sent copies of the letter to many reporters. One of them blogged about the controversy with a story wittily headlined "Cat Fight Brews Over Cat Brain:”

The letter marked a new low point in Markram's relationship with IBM. They had started out allies in 2005, when IBM signed an agreement with Markram's institution, the École Polytechnique Féderále in Lausanne, Switzerland. The goal of the joint project was to showcase IBM's Blue Gene/L, at that time the fastest supercomputer in the world, by using it to simulate the brain. Markram called the project "Blue Brain;” an allusion to IBM's nickname, "Big Blue:” But the relationship soured when Modha started a competing simulation project at IBM's Almaden Research Center.

Markram tried to defend his own work by accusing his competitor of fakery. But actually he cast doubt on the whole enterprise. Anyone can simulate a huge number of equations and claim it's like a brain. (You don't even need a supercomputer these days.) What's the proof? How do we know that Markram isn't a scammer too?

His glitzy supercomputer should not distract us from a potentially fatal flaw of his research: the lack of a well-defined criterion for judging success. In the future, Blue Brain could be evaluated with the specific Turing test described earlier, but this test only becomes useful when the simulation approaches the real thing. These purported mouse and cat brain simulations are not even in the ballpark yet. No "Mouse-tin Guerre" is going to fool you any time soon. The Turing test [a test of computer intelligence] will tell us when we've reached our destination, but until that day comes, we need a way of knowing if we're going in the right direction.

10 Comments

1. 1. iwasakidopsin 02:04 PM 6/11/12

   First of all, I would like to say that I learned a lot from the article about the current problems of neuronal simulation, thanks a lot!
   However, I think it's neccessary to say, that claiming to "simulate a cat's/mouse's brain" is not a philosophical question of what a brain is, but simply not possible, as was pointed out 3 pages later in this same article. Therefore, I would support Markram in his opposition, although I would choose different words.
   Apart from that, the article gives the impression, that the only purpose of the "Human Brain Project" is to provide a complete simulation of the human brain. Certainly, that was never the intention but rather to provide a reduced, yet realistic model or am I wrong?
   
   Greetings!
   

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2. 2. jsweck 05:21 PM 6/11/12

   I get the impression from the article that a lot of people believe that, “You are your brain”, and/or “You are your connectome”. Let me explain why I think this is an incorrect assumption.
   
   In information systems there is a concept called software, which means that the system has a memory that contains information (like a computer or a cortex). If you don’t know that your system is running a software system, it will seem to behave in utterly inexplicable ways to the hardware experts (biologists) who will attribute the complex behavior to some hardware element that they don’t quite understand (like the connectome). The connectome is a hardware detail, not software.
   The brain and mind are separate entities. The human brain is just a computer made of biological hardware. The mind system is a software system being processed by the cortex. That software is stored as weights on the neurons, not somehow embedded in the brain, or in the connectome designs. So neither the brain nor the connectome is “you”. You are the sum of information stored in memory (the learned software system). The Home sapiens version of the software system that develops over someone’s lifespan is what psychologists study. When you are born you have a brain, but no mind, because only a trivial amount of learned information has been accumulated, and it takes years to make a person.
   
   If what I’m saying is true, then uploading a mind is a much easier exercise, because you just need to read out the memory contents, and process the mind software on a more robust computing platform.
   

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3. 3. mtwohey2@yahoo.com 07:57 PM 6/11/12

   The Openworm project is working on the C. Elegans connectome. This document contains the excitatory and inhibitory neurons. The Google docs file is attached. Search for Openworm if the link does not work. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Avt3mQaA-HaMdHZuZnFuZmI5Q1VRU0VMekZ5d1QyZVE#gid=0

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4. 4. Trafalgar 08:19 PM 6/11/12

   Not everyone's neurons are going to be identical, methinks. First consider people who have brain damage, and second consider that brains do not all develop identically. How much of development is neurons and how much is connectomes (or something else, if connectomes don't include the 'weights' jsweck was referring to), I do not know.

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5. 5. z537815 07:44 AM 6/12/12

   Suppose a simulated brain passes the Turing test, how then do we know we've managed to simulate a human brain? I admit, this may be more of a philosophical question than a computational one, but still...
   But philosophy aside, I've always thought that to be able to properly simulate something, you'd first have to know exactly just what you're trying to simulate. After all, how else are you going to know whether you've succeeded? And these scientists are telling us that they do know how the human brain is wired together and how it functions? They can come up with objective metrics that tell us about succes or failure? I am very impressed.

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6. 6. Joetheplumber in reply to jsweck 10:26 AM 6/12/12

   The problem with seeing it as a "Software" vs. "Hardware" is this: At some level, all software is stored by a physical change in hardware.
   
   Whether that's transistors set to a particular position or the specific pattern of grooves in a DVD, "software" is not physically, intrinsically independent of hardware like you say it is. Software must change the hardware in order to store and process information.
   
   In this case, the argument is being made that the connectome may be the intrinsic "hardware" marker of "software" on the brain. Like the grooves on a DVD, changing the connectome changes the information stored. By using your analogy, you are born with a brain but without a mind because the connectome is random, and the "software" is random nonsense. As it is refined and becomes non-random you "learn" and your neurons are programmed to interact in certain, specific ways.
   
   You can see the connectome as "software" but at some level the software/hardware dichotomy becomes arbitrary as software is itself encoded on and processed by minute physical changes in hardware.

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7. 7. jsweck 02:07 PM 6/12/12

   Yes, software must ultimately be stored in some physical way in a memory system, but the software system is almost completely independent in operation. It is not some high level hardware abstraction; it’s a separate and independent system in memory.
   
   To see this, think about battling monsters in a computer game. What exactly is the nature of the monsters? It’s not the billions of randomly flipping logic gates in the computer; it’s a piece of software in independent operation, and there’s nothing random about its operation. All you need to have software is a memory system – the stuff you store in that system is always software. The cortex is primarily a memory system, so it must have a huge software system. When we learn, we are adding to those software data structures.
   
   The reason all computers exist is to solve problems. But you can only solve the simplest computational problems with logic gates or neurons – there is no way you can solve the big stuff, unless you create a memory system with those components. Then you simply move informational versions of the problem elements into memory, compute a bit, and the problem has the potential to be solved. So that having a memory system is the key to solve all big problems. In the computer world the only reason the hardware exists is to serve as the basis for the software system, and that software system is the one that solves all of the significant problems of the system. When the software is active the hardware people see random behavior, because they are not in control of the system.
   

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8. 8. GreenMind 03:51 PM 6/12/12

   I don't see how to avoid the idea that every neuron is actually unique, even if they also fall into subtypes. A single neuron fires when a person sees a picture of a particular person, and not when the person sees other people. Those neurons must be unique just by the memories stored in/by them.
   
   Suppose you try to simulate a computer that has no information stored in it? What would such a computer do? Maybe you can have fun watching the various connections light up randomly, but you aren't actually simulating a computer. You aren't simulating any actual thought process or transmission of information.
   
   It seems a bit like making a map of every road, highway, driveway and building in a country, and then simulating traffic patterns on them. Does that tell you anything about what is happening inside the houses, what the people think, or what the decisions of the government will be? Suppose you add all the phones, internet, cable networks, etc., and simulating electrical signals on them. Does that tell you what the people think or talk about? No, you have to model the components that remember and process memories and make decisions and then send that information out through the various forms of communication. Those components would be the people.
   
   What I am saying is that until you know how neurons store, process and transmit information, and actually include the information itself in the simulation, you can't simulate a nervous system.
   

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9. 9. Mong H Tan, PhD 05:00 PM 7/1/12

   RE: Beware of pseudoscientific pretensions in Brain-reductionist cognitions! (Continued from above)
   
   From a practical science and philosophy perspective today: Reductionism -- or specifically Physico-reductionism -- has its roots in our innate analytical thinking and inductive reasoning of physical facts and observations on Nature -- the Physical World -- since the primeval epistemological claims of the several pre and post-Socratic philosophers: Among whom, Thales (624-546 BCE) being the first who proclaimed that all entities come from water; and then, Anaximenes (circa 6th century BCE) who assumed that all things are composed of air; and centuries later, Epicurius (341-270 BCE) who intuited that all entities are made of atoms; and of course, of no lesser significant in his imagination, Aristarchus (circa 3rd century BCE) who was the first to pronounce that the sun is the center of the universe, and that the earth moves around the sun -- almost 2 millennia before Astronomy was first established as a Science (Physical Science) by Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) during the Renaissance in Europe and beyond!
   
   Fast forward to the 21st century: The latest antithetical (or anti-theism) reductionist-cosmologist pretension, is one that has been recently expressed by Stephen Hawking: in which he boldly declares that our Cosmos (or Universe) is created by Time and that Time is created by the Big Bang; and therefore, no theological imaginations or inspirations shall be necessary in his field of Physico-reductionist cosmology* and in which, Hawking has in fact (unknowingly and utterly) negated his own fundamental epistemological inquiry and reductionist speculation: What has had caused the Big Bang -- if there was indeed a Big Bang (nor God) at all!? Thus, Hawking should have had not irrelevantly or immaterially raised nor hackled Theology in his field of universally Physico-epistemological inquiry at all! -- [*See my comment on Physico-reductionism in cosmology today here: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-consolation-of-philos&posted=1&posted=1&posted=1#comment-110 -- "The Consolation of Philosophy -- RE: Physico-reductionism at its Best: When in a miraculous shebang Nothing became Everything in our Dynamic Universe! -- Or, could physico-reductionists (including evolutionary sophists and neo-Darwinists alike) be able to self-examine and heal themselves of their socio-reductionist-bias (or hubris) syndrome!?" (ScientificAmericanUSA; May 5)] (To be continued below)

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10. 10. aidyan 12:05 PM 8/5/12

    I think these people simply don't get it how tremendously complex nature is. The naive belief that funding a super supercomputer feeding it with several complicate rules won't work. It will not meet the expectations, as it was the case with the human genome project. It would be much better to use that money for several smaller researches than throwing it into another disappointing mammouth project.

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