A team of scientists with the Blue Brain Project recreated part of a young rat's brain with a computer and is aiming to eventually complete the digital organ.
According to Live Science, the digital brain contains 31,000 cells of 207 different kinds and 37 million different connections among them. The Blue Brain Project is aiming to complete the rat's brain before eventually creating a digital version of human's brain.
The researchers' study on the portion of the juvenile rat's brain is published in the journal Cell.
"The reconstruction required an enormous number of experiments," study co-author Henry Markram, of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), said in a press release. "It paves the way for predicting the location, numbers, and even the amount of ion currents flowing through all 40 million synapses."
To create their digital rendering of the rat's brain, the researchers observed a plethora of reactions from live animals and charted them before coming up with a map of which cells controlled which actions. The researchers then examined any and all studies on neocortex activity to cover what their experiments missed.
"An analogy would be a computer processer that can reconfigure to focus on certain tasks," Markram said. "The experiments suggest the existence of a spectrum of states, so this raises new types of questions, such as 'what if you're stuck in the wrong state?'"
