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
Since the very beginning of the computer revolution, researchers have dreamed of creating computers that would rival the human brain. Our brains are information machines that use inputs to generate outputs, and so are computers. How hard could it be to build computers that work as well as our brains?
In 1954 a Georgetown-IBM team predicted that language translation programs would be perfected in three to five years. In 1965 Herbert Simon said that “machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do.” In 1970 Marvin Minsky told Life magazine, “In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being.” Billions of dollars have been poured into efforts to build computers with artificial intelligence that equals or surpasses human intelligence. Researchers didn’t know it at first, but this was a moonshot a wildly ambitious effort that had little chance of a quick payoff.
Credit: eNeuro 2021
eNeuro is publishing a special collection of commentaries on April 30, 2021 on the neuroscience documentary
In Silico. The collection, titled Epistemological Lessons from the Blue and Human Brain Projects, features reactions to the documentary from leading neuroscientists as well as a discussion on brain modelling and massive research collaborations in general.
Noah Hutton s
In Silico follows neuroscientist Henry Markram and his attempt to develop a computer model of the brain. The collaboration, called The Human Brain Project, received €1 billion in funding and pledged to build a full model within ten years. The documentary chronicles Markram and his team as the project stirs up controversy and fails to meet its deadline.