Blue Brain Technology

13 min readMar 27, 2021

Abstract: Human brain is the most valuable creation of God. The man is intelligent because of the brain. “Blue brain” is the name of the world’s first virtual brain. That means a machine can function as human brain. Today scientists are in research to create an artificial brain that can think, response, take decision, and keep anything in memory. The main aim is to upload human brain into machine. So that man can think, take decision without any effort. After the death of the body, the virtual brain will act as the man. So, even after the death of a person we will not lose the knowledge, intelligence, personalities, feelings and memories of that man that can be used for the development of the human society.

Keywords: Nanobotes, Neurons, Sensory System, Blue Brain, skeleton.

Introduction

This literature gives an immense power to the world to create a duplicate human brain as “Virtual Brain or Blue Brain”. It is defined as a generation of such complex machine that works exactly same or in advance as the human brain performs. Our main objective is to enhance our super computer to perform all the activities that human brain can do. This is to be done because after decaying of human brain, we must preserves its power and its intelligence for a million of years. The Blue Brain is the latest discovery that may be used in many fields. One such field is in the area of the neural networks, where artificial intelligence and artificial neurons are widely used to enhance and control the neural network. This technology provides the simulation between the cerebral part of human brain and with the artificial intelligence network. The neuron’s that present in human brain being a part of cortex. The IBM company had already developed such type of Virtual Brain that do the same thing as the natural Human Brain can do. This made a long path or a long journey in improving, enhancing, our existing super computers that reveals the drastic change being occurred in the super computer era. It transforms the existing super computer into the “X-Super Computer”, to become highly impactful, which is supported by the IBM. This technology rapidly gets a lot of fame and recognition over the world wide web. Most of the favourable comments, reviews and blogs are seen by many of experts of different fields like from Physics, Biology, Neurology , Software Developers from the IT industries, all of them has decided to join their hands and do the work jointly to develop, enhance and implement this technology for the beneficiary of our society.

WHAT IS BLUE BRAIN?

The IBM is now developing a virtual brain known as the Blue brain. It would be the world’s first virtual brain. Within 30 years, we will be able to scan ourselves into the computers. We can say it as Virtual Brain i.e. an artificial brain, which is not actually a natural brain, but can act as a brain. It can think like brain, take decisions based on the past experience, and respond as a natural brain. It is possible by using a super computer, with a huge amount of storage capacity, processing power and an interface between the human brain and artificial one. Through this interface the data stored in the natural brain can be up loaded into the computer. So the brain and the knowledge, intelligence of anyone can be kept and used for ever, even after the death of the person.

Fig:- Blue brain worlds first virtual brain

The Blue Brain Project is an attempt to create a synthetic brain by reverse-engineering the mammalian brain down to the molecular level. The aim of the project, founded in May 2005 by the Brain and Mind Institute of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, is to study the brain’s architectural and functional principles. Goals of the project are to gain a complete understanding of the brain and to enable better and faster development of brain disease treatments. The project is headed by the founding director Henry Markram and co-directed by Felix Schürmann and Sean Hill. The research involves studying slices of living brain tissue. Data is collected about all the many different neuron types. This data is used to build biologically realistic models of neurons and networks of neurons in the cerebral cortex. The simulations are carried out on a Blue Gene running Michael Hines’s NEURON software, supercomputer built by IBM. Hence the name Blue Brain. Virtual brain is an artificial brain, which does not actually the natural brain, but can act as the natural brain. It can think like brain, take decisions based on the past experience, and response as the natural brain. It is possible by using a super computer, with a huge amount of storage capacity, high processing power and an interface between the human brain and this artificial one .Through this interface the data stored in the natural brain can be up loaded into the computer. So the knowledge, intelligence of anyone can be kept and used for ever, even after the death of the person.

NEED OF BLUE BRAIN

Today we are developed because of our intelligence. Intelligence is the inborn quality that cannot be created .Some people have this quality, so that they can think up to such an extent where other cannot reach. Human society is always in need of such intelligence and such an intelligent brain to have with. But the intelligence is lost along with the body after the death. The virtual brain is a solution to it. The brain and intelligence will be alive even after the death. We often face difficulties in remembering things such as people names, their birthdays, and the spellings of words, proper grammar, important dates, history facts, and etcetera. In the busy life everyone wants to be relaxed. Can’t we use any machine to assist for all these? Virtual brain may be a better solution for it. What will happen if we upload ourselves into computer, we were simply aware of a computer, or maybe, what will happen if we lived in a computer as a program?

Intelligence is an inborn gift. Different people have different intelligence level. Some people have such a high level of intelligence that others really can’t reach up to their level. But all of this comes to an end when life ends. This is where the need of Blue Brain is emerged. Blue Brain allows uploading the knowledge of a person on a computer and preserving it for a long time. This will also help in remembering things without any effort.

How It Is Possible?

First, it is helpful to describe the basic manners in which a person may be uploaded into a computer. Raymond Kurzweil recently provided an interesting paper on this topic. In it, he describes both invasive and noninvasive techniques. The most promising is the use of very small robots, or nanobots. These robots will be small enough to travel throughout our circulatory systems. All that is required is a computer with large enough storage space and processing power. Travelling into the spine and brain, they will be able to monitor the activity and structure of our central nervous system[2]. They will be able to provide an interface with computers that is as close as our mind can be while we still reside in our biological form.

Nanobots could also carefully scan the structure of our brain, providing a complete readout of the connections between each neuron. They would also record the current state of the brain. This information, when entered into a computer, could then continue to function as us. Is the pattern and state of neuron connections in our brain truly all that makes up our conscious selves? Many people believe firmly those we possess a soul, while some very technical people believe that quantum forces contribute to our awareness. But we have to now think technically. Note, however, that we need not know how the brain actually functions, to transfer it to a computer. The actual mystery of how we achieved consciousness in the first place, or how we maintain it, is a separate discussion.

Functioning of blue brain

It is quite complex process, how the brain is transformed into a computer machine. A very famous scientist named Raymond Kurgweil announces a very fruitful theory about a little robots and nanobots. These nanobots has a capacity that gives the view of our sensory system on the computer screen. It also provides the error free data of association of neurons that helps in determining the exact status of mind of human beings.We uploaded this data into the supercomputer for data processing, For this, we need excessive amount of memory space into the computer and also require rapid processing power.

Fig:-a cross section revealing the six layers of the cerebral cortex as well

as the columnar structure created by pyramidal neurons.

Pyramidal neurons in red: inhibitory fibers in blue.

BRAIN SIMULATION

Comparison between natural and simulated brain Table.1

Natural Brain

Simulated Brain

INPUT

In the nervous system in our body the neurons are responsible for the message passing. The body receives the input by sensory cells. This sensory cell produces electric impulses which are received by neurons. The neurons transfer these electric impulses to the brain.

INPUT

In a similar way the artificial nervous system can be created. The scientist has created artificial neurons by replacing them with the silicon chip. It has also been tested that these neurons can receive the input from the sensory cells. So, the electric impulses from the sensor cells can be received through these artificial neurons.

INTERPRETATION

The electric impulses received by the brain from neurons are interpreted in the brain. The interpretation in the brain is accomplished by means of certain states of many neurons

INTERPRETATION

The interpretation of the electric impulses received by the artificial neuron can be done by means of registers. The different values in these register will represent

different states of brain.

OUTPUT

Based on the states of the neurons the brain sends the electric impulses representing the responses which are

further received by sensory cell of our body to respond neurons in the brain at that time.

OUTPUT

Similarly based on the states of the register the output signal can be given to the artificial neurons in the body which will be received by the sensory cell.

MEMORY

There are certain neurons in our brain which represent certain states permanently. When required, this state is represented by our brain and we can remember the past things. To remember things we force the neurons to represent certain states of the brain permanently or for any interesting or serious matter this is happened implicitly.

MEMORY

It is not impossible to store the data permanently by using the secondary memory. In the similar way the required states of the registers can be stored permanently and when required these information can be received and used. be received and used.

PROCESSING

When we take decision, think about something, or make any computation, logical and arithmetic computations are done in our neural circuitry. The past experience stored and the current inputs received are used and the states of certain neurons are changed to give the output.

PROCESSING

In the similar way the decision making can be done by the computer by using some stored states and the received input and the performing some arithmetic and logical calculations.

Workflow of Neuron

The simulation step involves synthesizing virtual cells using the algorithms that were found to describe real neurons. The algorithms and parameters are adjusted for the age, species, and disease stage of the animal being simulated. Every single protein is simulated, and there are about a billion of these in one cell[3]. First a network skeleton is built from all the different kinds of synthesized neurons. Then the cells are connected together according to the rules that have been found experimentally. Finally the neurons are functionalized and the simulation brought to life. The patterns of emergent behaviour are viewed with visualization software.

A basic unit of the cerebral cortex is the cortical column. Each column can be mapped to one function, e.g. in rats one column is devoted to each whisker. A rat cortical column has about 10,000 neurons and is about the size of a pinhead.

The latest simulations, as of November 2011, contain about 100 columns, 1 million neurons, and 1 billion synapses. A real life rat has about 100,000 columns in total, and humans have around 2 million. Techniques are being developed for multiscale simulation whereby active parts of the brain are simulated in great detail while quiescent parts are not so detailed. Every two weeks a column model is run. The simulations reproduce observations that are seen in living neurons.

Emergent properties are seen that they require larger and larger networks. The plan is to build a generalized simulation tool, one that makes it easy to build circuits[1]. There are also plans to couple the brain simulations to avatars living in a virtual environment, and eventually also to robots interacting with the real world. The ultimate aim is to be able to understand and reproduce human consciousness.

Fig. Neuron visualization Fig. Neural network

HARDWARE/SOFTWARE/ COMPUTER

USED Blue Gene/P specifications:

1. 4,098 quad-core of nodes.

2. Every core is a PowerPC of 4.5, 8.5 GHz

3. It consists of more than 6*1013flops

4. 16 terabytes memory

5. 1 Peta Byte of disk space.

6. Operating system used is Linux SuSE

SLES 10

The machine given as marked as 99th fastest

supercomputer in the whole world .

Fig. Elementary neural microcircuit

Nanobots Methods

They are the small robots. They travel in our circulatory system. It monitors the activities and structure of CNS (Central Nervous System). It scans the structure of our brain and provide complete detailing between each neurons. It also reads the current status of the brain. All of these data are entered into computer for computing the detailed results.

UPLOADING HUMAN BRAIN

The uploading is possible by the use of small robots known as the nanobots. These robots are small enough to travel through out our circulatory system. Traveling into the spine and brain, they will be able to monitor the activity and structure of our central nervous system. They will be able to provide an interface with computer while we still reside in our biological form. Nanobots could also carefully scan the structure of our brain, providing a complete readout of the connection. This information, when entered into a computer, could then continue to function as us[2].

Thus the data stored in the entire brain will be uploaded into the computer IBM, in partnership with scientists at Switzerland’s Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne’s (EPFL) Brain and Mind Institute will begin simulating the brain’s biological systems and output the data as a working 3-dimensional model that will recreate the high-speed electro-chemical interactions that take place within the brain’s interior.

These include cognitive functions such as language, learning, perception and memory in addition to brain malfunction such as psychiatric disorders like depression and autism. From there, the modeling will expand to other regions of the brain and, if successful, shed light on the relationships between genetic, molecular and cognitive functions of the brain.

A BBP-SDK

The BBP-SDK (Blue Brain Project — Software Development Kit) is a set of software classes (APIs) that allows researchers to utilize and inspect models and simulations. The SDK is a C++ library wrapped in Java and Python.

STEPS FOR BUILDING A BLUE BRAIN

A. Data Acquisition

B. Data Simulation

C. Visualization of result

A. Data Acquisition

Data Acquisition involves taking individual slices of brain, and placing under microscope for observation purposes, to measure the electrical activity and shape of the individual neurons. The neurons are captured accordingly by their morphology (their shape), location within the cortex, their population density and electrophysiological behavior. The method of cataloguing and studying is very familiar worldwide. The observations are then translated into mathematical algorithms which describe the function, positioning and form of the neurons. The algorithms are then used to generate biologically realistic virtual neurons ready for the simulation phase.

B. Data Simulation

The Data Simulation itself consists of 3 major parts namely:

i. BBP-SDK

ii. Simulation Speed

iii. Simulation Workflow

i. BBP-SDK (NEURON)

The primary software used by the BBP (Blue Brain Project) for neural simulation is a package named NEURON. It is a software development kit, developed in the 1990s by Michael Hines at Yale University and by John Moore at Duke University. It is written in C, C++ and FORTAN programming language. BBP-SDK is open source software and is freely available online to work upon (where the website includes the required codes and also the binary data for free). The BBP team collaborated with Michael Hines to port the package to the massively parallel Blue Gene supercomputer in 2005.

Fig 2. BBP-SDK

ii. Simulation Speed

The simulations of one cortical column (more than 10,200 neurons) run at approximately 300 times slower than real time. Which means one second of simulated time takes about five minutes to complete. The simulation display uneven line scaling (which indicates that doubling the size of the neural network doubles the time it takes to simulate). Currently the primary goal is biological validity rather than the performance.

iii. Simulation Workflow

It involves synthesizing virtual cells using the algorithms that were found to describe the real neurons. The algorithms and parameters are adjusted for species, disease stage of the animal being simulated and the age. Every single protein is simulated (and there are about a billion of these in a single cell). Steps: Firstly, a network skeleton is built from all the synthesized neurons. After that the cells are connected together (based according to the rules that are found out experimentally). At last the neurons get functionalized and the simulation is brought to life. The blueprint of the emerging behavior is visualized using visualizing software.

Fig 3. Blue Gene

RTNeuron

Fig. RTneuron

The primary application used by the BBP for visualization of neural simulation is called as RTNeuron. The software is written in C++ and OpenGL programming language, and was developed internally by the BBP team. RTNeuron is an ad-hoc software which is specifically written for only neural simulations (which means it cannot be used or generalized for other simulations). RTNeuron renders the output from Hodgkin-Huxley simulations in Neuron into 3D. Which allows the researchers to watch as activation potentials propagate through a neuron and between the neurons each other? The animations can be started and zoomed, stopped, letting the researchers to interact with the model.

MERITS

1. It can be remembered without any effort .

2. The function and thinking of different animals can be understood by interpretation of electric impulse or signals from their brain.

3. The person after the death of his/her intelligence can be used for development or create of the human society and The activity of different animals can be understood.

DEMERITS

1. Human will be dependent on machines.

2. The Super computers used a large power as much as 1MU

3. The blue brain can be misused when the neural schema of a particular person is hacked.

APPLICATION

A. Cracking the Neural Code

B. Understanding Neocortical Information Processing

C. A Novel Tool for Drug Discovery for Brain Disorders

D. A Global Facility

E. A Foundation for Whole Brain Simulations

REFERENCE

A. http://www.ijsrp.org/research-paper-1015.php?rp=P464688