How the brain is wired has long been a question researchers would love to solve. Now, an international ensemble of scientists and engineers has digitalized a piece of the neocortex of the brain of young rats and offers a first-ever inside view of how the brain works.

The Blue Brain Project, a key part of the European Union’s 10-year Human Brain Project, has released a detailed computer representation of the microcircuitry of a small area of the rat’s somatosensory cortex, the part of the brain responsible for the sense of touch.

Using supercomputers, the 82 Blue Brain Project engineers and scientists—from institutions in Israel, Spain, Hungary, U.S., China, Switzerland, Sweden and the UK—simulated electrical behavior of virtual brain tissue and found that while some of the behavior observed in previous brain experiments was a match, other simulations revealed novel insights into the functioning of the neocortex.

“With the Blue Brain Project, we are creating a digital reconstruction of the brain and using supercomputer simulations of its electrical behavior to reveal a variety of brain states. This allows us to examine brain phenomena within a purely digital environment and conduct experiments previously only possible using biological tissue,” said Prof. Idan Segev of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a senior author of a research paper recently published in the journal Cell.

The findings culminate 20 years of biological experimentation that generated the core dataset, and 10 years of computational science work to develop the algorithms and build the software ecosystem required to digitally reconstruct and simulate the tissue.

“The insights we gather from these experiments will help us to understand normal and abnormal brain states, and in the future may have the potential to help us develop new avenues for treating brain disorders,” said Segev.

While science is still a long way from digitizing the whole brain, the study proves that it is feasible to digitally reconstruct and simulate brain tissue and to reveal novel insights into brain function.

Segev, director of Hebrew University’s department of neurobiology, sees the research as building on the pioneering work of the Spanish anatomist Ramon y Cajal more than 100 years ago.

“Ramon y Cajal began drawing every type of neuron in the brain by hand. He even drew in arrows to describe how he thought the information was flowing from one neuron to the next. Today, we are doing what Cajal would be doing with the tools of the day: building a digital representation of the neurons and synapses, and simulating the flow of information between neurons on supercomputers,” said Segev.

“The insights we gather from these experiments will help us to understand normal and abnormal brain states, and in the future may have the potential to help us develop new avenues for treating brain disorders.”

“The digitization of the tissue is open to the community and allows the data and the models to be preserved and reused for future generations.”

(via Israel21c)

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