The Human Brain Project

These are comments on the article in the Scientific American 2012 June, page 51.

I do not see the synergy between brain scale simulation and neuron simulation. They are both important they may need each other, but that does not imply synergy. I think that the developers should sit together and talk a few hours each week. Perhaps there are important intermediate simulation levels and this would lead to some synergy.

There is not much detail about what specific questions are to be addressed.
Web links:

I would feel better about this project if they better outlined the questions they hoped to address, and the literature that they will be building on. What has the Blue Brain Project found? When I imagine a computer engineer, a systems programmer and an applications programmer, together contemplating a project such as described here to figure out how some lap-top computer works, they would not hold out much hope. I think the task is not hopeless but I suspect that the next advances will discovering the right questions!

Other interesting links:

I suspect that some progress in understanding the brain will stem from arguing about how the brain could evolve. Understanding brains of other species will help here—simple animals first! That will be a long road but payoffs will be frequent!

Here is a strange hardware idea that might be relevant.