Posted on 06/06/2005 4:21:22 AM PDT by Pharmboy
International Business Machines Corp (IBM) is linking with a team of Swiss scientists to create the world's first accurate, computer-based model of the brain, the U.S. company said on Monday
The researchers hope that modeling the brain at the cellular level will give new insights into the workings of the most complex organ in the body.
The immediate goal is to model the circuitry in the neocortex, which accounts for about 85 percent of the human brain's mass and is thought to be responsible for language, learning, memory and complex thought.
By expanding the work to other areas, scientists hope to eventually generate a computer-based model of the entire brain.
Henry Markram and colleagues at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland, will spend the next two years using IBM's supercomputer Blue Gene to create a working 3-dimensional model of the neocortex.
The model will need to recreate all the myriad electro-chemical interactions of the brain's interior.
Markram said the project was one of the most ambitious neuroscience research initiatives ever undertaken, because of the hundreds of thousands of parameters would have to be taken into account.
The Blue Gene system to be installed in Lausanne will have a peak processing speed of at least 22.8 trillion floating-point operations per second, or 22.8 teraflops. Five years ago, no supercomputer in the world was capable of more than one teraflop.
Ah, for the days of my youth and my HO scale Swiss model brains!
I dunno.
I've met a lot of people who apparently never upgraded from the 4004 chip.
I dunno.
I've met a lot of people who apparently never upgraded from the 4004 chip.
Will wind up as full of holes as a trainload of Swiss cheese..............
LOL!! Musta been an old Compaq-type...
After that, I go for the phone book and go quickly through the "S"s..Voila...I spot something and the mystery name is solved.
I figure the senior moment stuff hasn't been filed yet or misfiled or it doesn't know where to file "sugar bowl in refrigerator".
That old relaxing and going over your path to find something works pretty good. I suppose it's just another "where do I file it".....under lost? That won't work. I didn't lose it. I put it someplace other than the usual place.
Watch out for brain overloads.
I have tried that method also. But I believe the brain also files things, not only by alpha order, but by sound or rhyme order. Reason being, I have often found that by using the vowel sounds and consonant sounds I can recall names or objects. If it were strictly alpha order, how would the brains of primitive tribes file things if they have no alphabet?.........
My favorite ones were the oooohhhhh OOOOOHHHHHHHH OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH Scale ;-)
They should start with the liberal brain which can run on a PC Jr. Then add reasoning, logic and the ability to discern facts. Then remove the Michael Moore kernel, etc.
RAM would be present/short-term action; all the stuff you can multi-task at a single time. (I think)
I find that sometimes I remember words or names by the colors I attribute to the letters. For some reason, I think different letters have different colors, ('d' is green, 'e' is yellow, 'm' is red), and a word ends up having a color of its own. It's weird how our minds' work.
uh.....yeah........When was your last flight physical?........
Har, har. I know I'm not the only one.
No matter how much they try, they can never top God. The brain is true undiscovered country and there will always be a certain portion that the Piling Higher and Deeper crowd will never figure out. It would be like Coca Cola giving away the secret formula.
Yes, you and the voices.......I know.......
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