• Question: do you think it might be possible for humans to one day build an artificial brain that works as well as the real thing?

    Asked by ubermidget to Ben, James, Jen, Michael, Susanna on 11 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Jen Todd Jones

      Jen Todd Jones answered on 11 Mar 2013:

      It might well be possible but it is a very very long way away, at the moment there are some projects across the world trying to build a brain either physically or simulated on a computer. But, the brain has 85 billion connections between neurons and creating a computer of this size at the moment is impossible, not to say it always will be.

      Here’s one of the projects in Europe at the moment, first they’re building a simple rat brain, then a cat brain, and then a human brain! http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/page-56882-en.html

    • Photo: Susanna Martin

      Susanna Martin answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      Even if we could i’m not sure if we’d be allowed to. Something you may not realise is that in psychology before you do an experiment you have to get ethical approval, this means other people decide whether your experiment is likely to harm anyone. I think a few people would be concerned about a robot brain which was as good as a human one, you’d also have to think about what it means to be human, and at what point is that robot ‘alive’. Like Jen’s mentioned though their are scientists who are working on replicating certain bits of the brain, and seeing how we can use technology along side the brain. Have a look at this talk to see some other projects http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8HeFNJjuj0

    • Photo: James Stovold

      James Stovold answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      As Jen says, the blue brain project is looking to build an entire artificial brain, but whether this is a good idea is another matter!! Susanna touched on this idea a little bit, with the ethical implications of building a robot that is `alive’, but what’s more important — in mine opinion — is how difficult it is to build something that represents the brain.

      Although there are around 10^11 neurons (100 000 000 000) with 10^15 connections between them (1 000 000 000 000 000), this (surprisingly) isn’t the difficult part of building an artificial brain! While it is very difficult to build a computer powerful enough to simulate this many neurons, the number of different chemicals and molecules and the interactions between them is so complex that it takes a powerful computer just to simulate a few of these neurons. In this sense, the networks of artificial neurons that I use to control my robots are vastly over-simplified — they have none of this complex detail that is what makes the brain such a fascinating subject to study.

      From this perspective, at the moment it doesn’t look likely to be able to build a full artificial brain, purely because of how complex it is. On top of this, the artificial brain wouldn’t work as well as the real brain because the adult brain has had a large amount of time to learn about the world around it through the person’s senses. While this doesn’t sound like much, just having the brain interacting with the world is enough to modify the connections in the brain, meaning that an artificial brain would not work anywhere near as well as a real brain, because it hasn’t been able to learn from the world for a number of years.

      In short, no. 🙂

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