It seems that we are making strides towards developing a digital persona of ourselves, and who knows, one day the pipe dream of being able to translate our consciousness into a computer might be possible – which would mean that one is able to live for virtually forever. Well, researchers have made the claim that they have successfully come up with a digital replica of part of a rat brain, now how about that? Known as the Blue Brain Project, it is hosted at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL).
This particular project would see the digital reconstruction a rat brain that has been happening over the course of the past decade. The group did claim in a paper published last week that they achieved success in what is deemed to be a first draft of the project, where 31,000 simulated neurons have been “digitized”, so to speak, although there is a long, long way to go out of the approximately 21 million estimated neurons in a whol rat brain – no prizes for guessing just how much more difficult this effort would be if you were to translate it to that of a human brain!
It remains to be seen whether the final product will be viable enough to work with that of the human brain, although there would be a slew of ethical concerns that will arise from there.
Filed in . Read more about Science.