BLUEBRAIN – Year One: Documentary Film Preview
We are very proud to present the world premiere of BLUEBRAIN – Year One, a documentary short which previews director Noah Hutton’s 10-year film-in-the-making that will chronicle the progress of The Blue Brain Project, Henry Markram’s attempt to reverse-engineer a human brain. Enjoy the piece and let us know what you think.
The film is being produced by Noah Hutton’s production company, Couple 3 Films.
Must-see. Is 2020 the release date for the documentary, though, or the deadline for the project?
Thanks Max – Markram’s estimate is that he’ll have a full human brain built in ten years, so however long it takes, that’s how long it’ll take to make this film.
Both. The project will be finished in ten years (!!!). And the documentary shall be a 10 year film. Maybe one video released each year. This is the first year. This is really interesting don’t you think?
Awesome. I think this is the most exciting project in all of neuroscience, and Markram enumerated the reasons why much better here than I have seen him do in other places, such as his TED talk.
Did you ever discuss ethical issues about the project, such as the ethical implications of simulating a functioning human brain down to the molecular level and what rights that simulated brain would have? I could see the project becoming very controversial when it progresses to that stage.
What other parts of the body (such as motor nerves, the retina, etc) will you have to simulate so that the simulated brain can interact with an environment? Do they intend to set up the brain to control a virtual body in a virtual world or a real robotic body in real life?
Where do you draw the line between a simulation of a brain and an authentic brain?
Speaking of connections between science and art, I’m reminded of a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, “Of Exactitude in Science:”
In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography.
Thanks a lot for watching and for your comments Eric. I spoke briefly with Markram about some ethical issues but it was a bit too much to get all that into this first piece. The short of it is that he believes this technology itself is not inherently dangerous– but it can be intentionally used in a dangerous way. In terms of human rights for this brain… that will be good material for a future interview, so thanks for bringing that up.
They intend to scale the model up from a rodent brain (which is the current work being done), to a cat brain, to a primate brain, and finally to a human brain, each time using an avatar in a virtual environment that will be controlled by the Blue Brain. We didn’t get into specifics of what parts of the peripheral nervous system they’ll be simulating, and what they’ll do about visual input. It is interesting to think about where the neurons end and the pure digital data from the virtual environment would begin and how sensory input is to be handled.
Thanks for those thoughts and for the great Borges excerpt. My hope in posting these ongoing segments from this project will be to get this kind of feedback that will help to shape the film and address important avenues of future questioning, so it’s great to hear from you about all this.
I have a few questions to ask, but first I would like to thank you for this video. It is truly amazing and I am very excited for the final model/facility. But I do have a few questions that you might be able to help me with:
Will the simulated neurons act like real neurons and make new connections and build new neurons?
Will various regions or the brain (cerebellum etc) be modeled with the neocortex?
Can the computer go through different stages of alertness such as sleep stages like dreaming?
Do we know the all chemical molecules released from the synapse?
Thank you very much for reading this. Sorry I am only 16 and have been researching the brain for just a few years. Cheers! You are doing a fantastic job.
Joshua,
Thanks for watching and thanks for getting in touch.
The simulated neurons will act like real neurons to a very fine level of precision because all of the data used to build them is originally taken from biological data acquired from thousands of experiments looking at both electrophysiological dynamics as well as ion channels and other cellular structures.
The plan is to take the basic units of the various morphologies of the modeled neurons and build different brain regions based on the profile of those regions and what cells they contain.
Not sure about sleep stages and dreaming. Right now the researchers are building cortical columns in a rat brain and I don’t think this question can be addressed yet.
We may not know absolutely all the chemicals released from synapses across the brain, but it seems researchers have a pretty sound understanding at this point of the character and behavior of ion gradients, ion channels, and what chemical cascades underlie an action potential in a neuron. That’s the data that’s being used to build the neurons for Blue Brain.
Thanks for your questions and stay in touch.
Brain waves:
Electroencephalography:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroencephalography
That should answer my question. It has a lot to do with the neurotransmitters and receptors that cause an electrical current/wave. This would explain the different brain states; beta, alpha theta and delta. Cheers!
This is terrifyingly amazing. I really don’t know whether to be excited or afraid of the possibilities this could open up for mankind. It would be great for solving brain anomalies, but I know it won’t stop there. It’s so interesting though that I don’t want it to stop.
Blue Brain Year One…
Film-maker Noah Hutton has just released an excellent 15-minute documentary short on the Blue Brain project that captures the team as they work and explains the goals of the ambitious attempt to simulate animal, and eventually human scale neural networ…
[...] The Blue Brain Project is an ambitious effort to model a brain, neuron by neuron, in order to understand its systems and functions in new ways and to build the facility to model brains across species. “I believe we will understand the brain before we finish building it,” says the project’s director, Henry Markram. First video release of a ten year documentary series by director Noah Hutton, following the project as it develops. Gorgeous imagery and an inspiring subject. See also: Blue Brain Neocortical Column Visualization, and the short lecture Simulated Brain by Dr. Markram. Hat tip: The Beautiful Brain. [...]
The photographs are lovely, like Jackson Pollock paintings, but I’m reminded of lyrics from a Leonard Cohen song:
“…they’ll never ever reach the moon,
at least not the one that we’re after;
it’s floating broken on the open sea, look out there, my friends,
and it carries no survivors.
But lets leave these lovers wondering
why they cannot have each other…”
Still, the Bluebrain experiment seems more worthy than some of Nasa’s projects, equally expensive. Yet again, the black boxes the brain is currently housed in look very much like those on the moon at the beginning of the movie “2001, A Space Odyssey.”
Agreed. I also had the “2001, A Space Odyssey” reaction.
Noah,
This is truly incredible! How can I post this to my facebook to let people know about it??? Jen
I watched your video because your dad posted it on twitter. I think not only is it very awesome you have a father that supports your work and gifts but also wow, Noah Hutton, you are brilliant at film making.
Your video flowed very well and I really enjoyed watching it even though I don’t know much about the brain.
I like making videos as well, but my videos are for churches who want to spread God’s word visually. Making films is so rewarding. I love everything about it. So, it’s nice to meet you Noah. Keep up the good work and I hope to see more of your videos in the future.
This project is another example how we can work together to help others. The brain modeling is intriguing and may lead to many breakthroughs for mankind. I look forward to future updates. As the world gets smaller, this is one area of discovery for those explorers out there.
Documentary about making a computer brain…
Last year, I posted about Blue Brain, a project launched to simulate the human brain using an IBM computer. The project’s director, Henry Markram, has said that he thinks he can accomplish it in ten years. Filmmaker Noah Hutton has started a document…
An extremely interesting subject and project. I’ve always been fascinated with how we think the way we do, why some individuals are smarter than others etc. and as the daughter of a parent with Alzheimers and the spouse of a depressive (especially appreciate Dr. Markham’s remark about pills); I am hopeful that his progress towards a better understanding of the brain’s functions and processes will be beneficial in resolving some of these types of issues.
Mr. Hutton’s initial opening shots are beautiful, the office tour by the Project Manager seems a bit choppy but I totally love his choice of backround music. Hope there will be further “updates” on this film/documentary.
[...] will be completed when Markram succeeds. Above is a preview of the film-in-progress, titled “Bluebrain – Year One.” (Thanks, Lisa Braun [...]
interesting trailer,
quite like the music what is it?
thanks
The opening music is Miles Davis’ “It Ain’t Necessarily So” from Porgy and Bess and the longer piece for the rest is from Terry Riley’s “In C”
Thanks for watching.
Strange. I was quite bothered by the suspenseful music – I kept thinking, what, is a terrorist going to leap out of his desk drawers?
[...] Source: thebeautifulbrain.com [...]
BLUEBRAIN – Year One: Documentary Film Preview | The Beautiful Brain…
BLUEBRAIN – Year One: Documentary Film Preview | The Beautiful Brain…
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Thanks Noah, I think that it’s a great idea to follow this amazing project till its successful end.
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In the article “Out Of The Blue” on the Seed magazine (from 2008) it was said that Hanry Markram is planning to connect the Blue Brain with a virtual or robotic body and see if it’s acting like a real rat, I think that this is a very efficient way to see if the model is built correctly or not:
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http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/out_of_the_blue
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“Henry Markram is talking to a Japanese company about constructing the mechanical animal…. If the robotic rat just bumps into walls, then we’ve got a problem…. Installing Blue Brain in a robot will also allow it to develop like a real rat. The simulated cells will be shaped by their own sensations, constantly revising their connections based upon the rat’s experiences. What you ultimately want is a robot that’s a little bit unpredictable, that doesn’t just do what we tell it to do, the goal is to build a virtual animal—a rodent robot—with a mind of its own”
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Also on another article on the BBC news it was said that “The Blue Brain has been put in a virtual body, and observing it gives the first indications of the molecular and neural basis of thought and memory”
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sci/tech/8012496.stm
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I didn’t see any reference to this interesting issue in your movie, didn’t he say anything about it? how does their virtual rat acting? what tests are they doing with it and how does the results fits with the same tests performing with a real rats?
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Please let me know if you have any information about this becouse it’s really sounds very interesting, and I can’t find any information about it on the net.
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Thanks.
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Thanks for your question. He talks about this issue at 10:15 in the video. They haven’t done it yet, but the team plans to connect the Blue Brain to an avatar in a virtual environment to collect sensory experience, and to be controlled by the Blue Brain. They’ll do this first with a rat.
Thanks Noah, you right I miised that, but that’s very strange, becouse in the BBC article which is from April 2009 Henry Markram said that they already done it “The Blue Brain has been put in a virtual body, and observing it gives the first indications of the molecular and neural basis of thought and memory…… the column is being integrated into a virtual reality agent – a simulated animal in a simulated environment, so that the researchers will be able to observe the detailed activities in the column as the animal moves around the space…… It starts to learn things and starts to remember things…..”
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sci/tech/8012496.stm
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It sounds as they already done that.
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That’s strange.
[...] BLUEBRAIN – Year One: Documentary Film Preview | The Beautiful Brain – none [...]
[...] now a documentary short covering the project called “BLUEBRAIN – Year One”. It’s a little over 16 [...]
[...] The Beautiful Brain – A Documentary [...]
[...] going to tackle a ten year documentary project following neuro-scientist Henry Markram’s Blue Brain project. I am most inspired by people who think like this : who acknowledge the long term plans that are [...]
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Check this 2 Astonishing lectures of Henry Markram:
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http://neuroinformatics2008.org/congress-movies/Henry%20Markram.flv/view
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http://ditwww.epfl.ch/cgi-perl/EPFLTV/home.pl?page=start_video&lang=2&connected=0&id=365&video_type=10&win_close=0
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Very interesting article from the ‘Seed’ magazine:
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http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/out_of_the_blue
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http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/out_of_the_blue/P2
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And a few more interesting links about the project:
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sci/tech/8012496.stm
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bz5IUaRr8No
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLCT3wU4fek
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[...] Film on how to build a brain (tags: brain ai research neuroscience math) [...]
Fantastic stuff. This is quite an ambitious project. A Sisyphusian (or Fitzcarraldo-ian) task, if you will.
Dr. Markram’s eyes are interesting to watch in his interview. Very blue – which goes well with his ‘blue brain’ title. And I thought that his reaction to your question ‘how do you carry on?’ is great, and very telling.
I have a billion questions about the project itself, especially since this stuff is way beyond my payscale. But the one that I keep coming back to is:
What about the plasticity of the brain? I think of the brain as something that’s constantly moving and changing and evolving and adapting, based on what the brain is actually being used for. Right? The human brain is a product of years and years of decisions and experiences and neural ‘habits’ and so forth. Because we think a certain way or respond a certain way to outside stimulii, we groove out certain neural pathways and smooth out others.
Maybe another way of saying this is that our brain ‘hardware’, in addition to informing our behavior, also changes as a RESULT of our behavior (isn’t this the argument behind fields like epigenetics?). How would a reverse-engineered brain compensate for this time-factor. Would it “mature”, would it develop “habits” based on the tests we ran on it? Or would it remain the same depending on which data we tried to run through it’s system?
Maybe I’m way off the mark here with the actual science, but I just thought I’d throw this idea out there.
Hi Jeremy, did you check the links in my last comment? did you see the 2 lectures of Henry Markram? I think that you will find there most of the answers to your questions, the Blue Brain is also very plastic just like your brain, and it planned to learn new things just like your brain, one option will be to turn it on and to start learning it things, like a baby, OR, it should be possible to put inside the simulation data that was scaned from a grown up person, so that when you will turn the simulation on it will right away start acting like a grown up person.
Wow! Thanks for the response.
I’m even more baffled now by the project.
I did not click the links yet, but I’ll do so right now, in hopes that I can figure out exactly how it’s going to work…
Hi Jeremy, I don’t want to confuse you, when I sent the links I sent them under the username “Smart Brain”. I recommended that you will see the 2 lectures of Henry Markram first, they are really amazing, and have lot of information about the project, then check the article from the ‘Seed’ magazine, then check the other links.
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Please tell me if you have any questions about this subject.
Amazing work Henry! Is Rod Douglas involved in this as well? Just yesterday I was looking at a picture of Neil, Laurie, Barry, me and you at Clanwilliam Dam and here you are at the forefront of neuroscience where you belong!
Will be watching this space closely.
Best wishes
Jim Abrahams
Sorry for asking, but who is Rod Douglas? and who are Neil, Laurie, Barry and you? are your involving in a brain research? can you give here a link to this picture? do you know Henry Markram in real life?
[...] MindHacks, comes this link to a preview of a documentary-in-progress on The Blue Brain, that epic attempt to create a conscious [...]
I don’t think there is a subject more fascinating, so I’m excited to follow their progress via this documentary. However, please find different background music. It’s VERY annoying, and I kept wishing that I could turn it off.
Paton,
Sorry to hear you found the music annoying– the piece is Terry Riley’s “In C” and for now it’s just a placeholder– I’ll be composing the score for the full-length documentary once it’s done in ten years (or whenever Markram finishes). Here are some songs I’ve composed: http://www.couple3.com/main/music/
Thanks for watching.
[...] reviewed here is a preview of a documentary of the first year of the Blue Brain project (available here). This is a 15 minute video which looks at the Blue Brain project. The sound in the video is clear, [...]
Fascinating. Great work, Noah.
AMAZING!!! (and a bit scary…) Just read a “Whole Brain Emulation Roadmap” from Oxford University 2008 and it is very theoretical and implies for me that practical realization is more or less impossible because too much is unknown about how the brain components work. Especially if it is possible to emulate the whole system with binary computation technology.
Now I understand the Blue Brain Project is real and seems to reach a first emulated brain-like system in the next years. And it will be pure software model (am I right?).
BTW: …Dr. Markram reminds me a bit of a lab chief in a Hollywood science fiction movie with an amazing vision… I mean it positive…
I am working in information retrieval and would like to have access to some data to analysis. Is it possible?
BLUEBRAIN – Year One: Documentary Film Preview | The Beautiful Brain…
BLUEBRAIN – Year One: Documentary Film Preview | The Beautiful Brain…
Thanks. It was great.
It was a long time that we have not heard any news from BlueBrain. It gives me a new insight about this project.
Thanks again
Thanks Noha
It was great. It was a long time that I couldnt find any news about BlueBrain. This video gave me a new insight about This project. Thanks again
I have been reading everything I could about this project. This is the most exciting thing happening today. Another person working from a similar angle is Jeff Hawkins. When he is finished building it will it have eyes and ears. What will it be like if it can’t experience the world with certain senses like taste,feel and smell? There are so many things about this that I have questions about.
Hi there,
that’s a great project! I would like to join it if it would be possible. Anyway till then I joined the project on twitter.
My question: did you mentioned the aging of the neurons? Just after your birth in your first years are the most of the synaptic connections setting up. Your simulation and model should concern to this. So I think if you connect an avatar, you should simulate also the childhood of this blue brain AI.
Good luck & cheers.
That’s incredibly interesting to see the advances in technology and the understanding of the brain in such a short time, then to leap again over the next ten years to be able to potentially replicate a human brain in a completely computerized form. To think of the possibilities for medicine and even for students to understand the memory and be able to use this information to learn to the best of their capabilities. It’s quite amazing.
Great job guys!!! New concrete frontiers on understanding how the brain works and how it governs our body and how it make decisions. Go guys GO!!!!! Fabio
[...] Hutton’s company Couple 3 Films has released year 1 of a 10 year documentary project documenting the Blue Brain project. The project includes Henry Markham’s work on reverse [...]
If they are working on a whole brain, why has everything that’s been released to the public been limited to the neocortex? Where are the 3D-rendered pictures of simulated cerebellum, hippocampus, hypothalamus, spinal cord?
Come on Blue Brain, I want to see a simulated Purkinje cell! Surely you will need them, or else the poor sim-rat will be banging into the walls for sure.
[...] session on Saturday evening, I presented year one of my ongoing Blue Brain Project documentary film project and received some invaluable feedback from those in attendance. The screening morphed into a lively [...]
Fantastic project!
It reminds me a lot of the belgium comic “Alvin Norge”, where a great informatician produces a sowftare human brain, based on real slices of a murderer’s brain who gave is body to science. Besides all the “normal” functions, he also accidentaly copies the “abnormal” functions that made the man a criminal.
In the FAQ you said that you don’t really know what is consciousness. By replicating a brain based on a real model, do you think you can also copy its own specific functions (memories, traits), either on purpose or without even knowing it?
Anyway, this really has something scary…
PS: Maybe you answered these questions in the video, I can’t see it for now but still wanted to post my thoughts..
I have always used the notion of death as a useful means of putting things in perspective; as a place holder for an existence so far from my current reality, but which cannot be escaped, that my current troubles will no longer matter.
Increasingly the notion of the ‘singularity’ seems to provide a far more potent substitute for death, in its power to evoke feelings of a relentless advance to an irresistible and inevitable ‘end’. An end not in the arms of death, but much like a baby still in its mother’s womb cannot hope to understand or imagine its existence after birth, the singularity, by its very definition, demands from humanity that we forfeit what we think makes us human for an existence unknown.
[...] There’s an interesting documentary on the stuff http://thebeautifulbrain.com/2010/02/bluebrain-film-preview/ [...]