In Silico doesn't look slick, but it is a sharply scripted documentary about an ambitious, billion-euro project to model the intricacies of the human brain – and in just 10 years, says Simon Ings
Illustration by Jeremy Leung, Published 14:37, May. 19, 2021
In the ’90s, when he was a doctoral student at the University of Lausanne, in Switzerland, neuroscientist Sean Hill spent five years studying how cat brains respond to noise. At the time, researchers knew that two regions the cerebral cortex, which is the outer layer of the brain, and the thalamus, a nut-like structure near the centre did most of the work. But, when an auditory signal entered the brain through the ear, what happened, specifically? Which parts of the cortex and thalamus did the signal travel to? And in what order? The answers to such questions could help doctors treat hearing loss in humans. So, to learn more, Hill, along with his supervisor and a group of lab techs, anaesthetized cats and inserted electrodes into their brains to monitor what happened when the animals were exposed to sounds, which were piped into their ears via miniature headphones. Hill’s probe then captured the brain signals th
Scientific American
Beware the hype about remaking neuroscience through technology, writes the director of the new documentary
In Silico
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Twelve years ago, when I graduated college, I was well aware of the Silicon Valley hype machine, but I considered the salesmanship of private tech companies a world away from objective truths about human biology I had been taught in neuroscience classes. At the time, I saw the neuroscientist Henry Markram proclaim in a TED talk that he had figured out a way to simulate an entire human brain on supercomputers within 10 years. This computer-simulated organ would allow scientists to instantly and noninvasively test new treatments for disorders and diseases, moving us from research that depends on animal experimentation and delicate interventions on living people to an “in silico” approach to neuroscience.
There are two ways to study the brain: in vivo (in a living organism) or in vitro (in the petri dish). But what if there was a third way? Neuroscientist Henry Markram envisions in silico, and that was the root of his Blue Brain Project: a plan to create a full electronic brain. But was Markram an interdisciplinary visionary, an arrogant techno dude bro, or Don Quixote?
It s incorrect to describe
In Silico as Noah Hutton s documentary follow-up to to his brilliant, incisive techno-satire
Lapsis, since he s been working on it for a decade. Filming, he notes in his own commentary, began not long after Markram took to the TED stage and predicted that, not only was replicating the human brain doable, but that if it worked then he would be able to send a hologram to deliver a talk by itself.