Blue Brain Project hopes to create a digital brain by 2024.

The Blue Brain Project has been working since 2005 to build a complete computer model of a cortical column from a rat - one of the basic blocks of the brain structure. According to boingboing:

“You know that brains start with neurons, cells that can transmit electrochemical signals. A single neuron is like one person, standing around by themselves and playing an instrument. A cortical column is like an orchestra, with thousands of neurons communicating and working together to accomplish a single task. There are 10,000 neurons in a single rat cortical column. Ten thousand neurons, an amazing amount of complexity—just to do something simple, like twitch a single whisker. To make a whole functional rat brain, you need 100,000 cortical columns. The larger, more complex human brain is even more astounding, with some 100,000 neurons to a single cortical column and perhaps as many as 2 millioncolumns.

Recreating that on a computer requires a frightening amount of processing capability. Each neuron, alone, needs the equivalent of a standard laptop. The computer that the Swiss team used to model a single rat cortical column is a massive beast, one of the fastest supercomputers in the world.

The Blue Brain Project is currently in the running for a European Commission research grant that would bring in 100 million euros a year for 10 years. The final decision won’t happen until next Spring, but if Blue Brain gets the nod, it’ll become the Human Brain Project—and could be a major step toward creating a man-built mind. (Or death by Skynet, depending on whether you’re a glass-is-half-empty kind of person.)”

Check out more photos of the project here.