The human brain project has been recently getting a lot of attention with the US Government carving out funding for the brain mapping project. The interesting thing is that this project has been started by the European Union since 2005. It is called the blue brain project and it is about simulating the human brain.
Markaram’s group had discovered a module based organization of the human brain that is repeated in the brain that may be responsible for learning through pattern recognition. They decided to model the structure using computers. To do that, he first determined all the connections and tried to find out all the biochemical and ion channel operations at the neuronal level. His first simulation was with one single neuron and then expanded to multiple neurons. In 2008, it was a column of the rat brain with 10,000 neurons. In 2011, his group simulated nearly a million cells. As target, his group intends to simulate the entire brain by 2023.
The project has been supported by Europe scientists and IBM and has the lofty goal of simulating the human brain and does have many detractors too that claim that spending large sums of money on a single project like this keeps the funds away from other projects and also that the project may not accomplish much by just simulating the brain but rather an understanding of the brain is required before it can be simulated on such a grand scale.