If this video doesn’t load – click here.

Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain project, says the mysteries of the mind can be solved — soon. Mental illness, memory, perception, working memory and fluid intelligence: they’re made of neurons and electric signals, and he plans to find them with a supercomputer that models all the brain’s 100,000,000,000,000 synapses! (From TED)

The Blue Brain Project is a supercomputing artificial intelligence (AI) project that is modelling the mammalian brain (its neocortex) to precise cellular detail using computer chips. They started with a rat’s brain. Now they are aiming to fully model the human brain, and with this computer brain, recreate the universe that each of us experiences!

Take the 10 minutes it takes to watch this video. It gives one the idea that we are all caught in our own subjective bubble – and that the vast universe around us – as we experience and know it – is simply a construction of our brains electrical patterns. Do you agree with this ’subjective bubble’ idea? What else could our experience of reality be based on other than electrical activity in our own brains, and our own ‘mental models’ of what is going on ‘out there’?

The 2,000-microchip Blue Gene machine is capable of processing 22.8 trillion operations per second—just enough to model a 1-cubic-mm column of rat neocortex! The human neocortex is nearly 2 m² and 2 mm thick – and it’s basic processing units – the ‘cortical columns’ – are more complex.