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That guy
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Mouse brain simulated on computer
April 28, 2007 - 12:09 AM
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US researchers have simulated half a virtual mouse brain on a supercomputer.
The scientists ran a "cortical simulator" that was as big and as complex as half of a mouse brain on the BlueGene L supercomputer.
In other smaller simulations the researchers say they have seen characteristics of thought patterns observed in real mouse brains.
Now the team is tuning the simulation to make it run faster and to make it more like a real mouse brain.
Brain tissue presents a huge problem for simulation because of its complexity and the sheer number of potential interactions between the elements involved.
The three researchers, James Frye, Rajagopal Ananthanarayanan, and Dharmendra S. Modha, laid out how they went about it in a very short research note entitled "Towards Real-Time, Mouse-Scale Cortical Simulations".
Half a real mouse brain is thought to have about eight million neurons each one of which can have up to 8,000 synapses, or connections, with other nerve fibres.
Modelling such a system, the trio wrote, puts "tremendous constraints on computation, communication and memory capacity of any computing platform".
The team, from the IBM Almaden Research Lab and the University of Nevada, ran the simulation on a BlueGene L supercomputer that had 4096 processors, each one of which used 256MB of memory.
Using this machine the researchers created half a virtual mouse brain that had 8,000 neurons that had up to 6,300 synapses.
The vast complexity of the simulation meant that it was only run for ten seconds at a speed ten times slower than real life - the equivalent of one second in a real mouse brain.
On other smaller simulations the researchers said they had seen "biologically consistent dynamical properties" emerge as nerve impulses flowed through the virtual cortex.
In these other tests the team saw the groups of neurons form spontaneously into groups. They also saw nerves in the simulated synapses firing in a ways similar to the staggered, co-ordinated patterns seen in nature.
The researchers say that although the simulation shared some similarities with a mouse's mental make-up in terms of nerves and connections it lacked the structures seen in real mice brains.
Imposing such structures and getting the simulation to do useful work might be a much more difficult task than simply setting up the plumbing.
For future tests the team aims to speed up the simulation, make it more neurobiologically faithful, add structures seen in real mouse brains and make the responses of neurons and synapses more detailed.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6600965.stm
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mnopq
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Re: Mouse brain simulated on computer
June 29, 2007 - 10:45 AM
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Well, experiments in 1960s on rats to find out subtle structures of rat brains yielded results which seemed to contradict each other...
Mouse is even less close on a hierarchical level to humans (if the objective of their simulation was to find similarities or possibly enhance our understanding of human brain/mind functionality).
The closest to us is the common chimp and that is where scientists must (again) begin to investigate. There is already much known about the chimp DNA and a rudimentary language of chimpz has been found already several decades ago.
I understand the complexity of the task to simulate a chimp brain but that would be more useful than doing the sasme on mice.
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Gazby 7
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Re: Mouse brain simulated on computer
July 20, 2007 - 04:51 AM
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Thats so cool. I didnt think it was possible but here we have evidence
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Jacobs
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Re: Mouse brain simulated on computer
September 29, 2007 - 09:01 PM
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yeah i read about this
and i read also about that strange experience in which they connected a mouse brain to a computer and try to save the signals as they said its the mouse memory to the computer and restore it to another mouse brain :S that is really weird but if its a success hooooa that would be superb
saving your memories on a flash disk  what a nice fantasy (for the moment at least)
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