Creating a virtual model of the human brain is one thing. I do it all the time, doodling little cerebrums while I talk on the phone. But getting your model to behave just like its flesh-and-blood counterpart? That’s a Frankenstein moment right there. Researchers with the Swiss-based Blue Brain Project have just created a virtual pack of neurons that acts just like the real thing, and hope to get an e-brain up and running. I hope somebody yelled “It’s alive!”

Launched by the EPFL in 2005, the Blue Brain Project is an attempt to reverse-engineer the brain. As most folks know, the human brain is made up of lots (and lots and lots) of neurons – around 100 billion or so. These neurons connect and communicate with each other through a dizzying network of something like 100 trillion synapses. If these numbers are making your own brain hurt, you now have a sense for how hard it is to make an artificial brain.

But all hope is not lost. Genes don’t really code the body like blueprints do for a building, mapping out every single detail; instead, they give a more general instruction and hit the “repeat” button a few million times (e.g. when they give fractal instructions). This means that amid the great complexity of the whole brain, there are structural units that repeat themselves. One such structure is called a neocortical column (NCC): a group of about 10,000 neurons in the cerebral cortex that are organized in a relatively consistent way across the mammalian brain. Millions of these columns compose the whole of your grey matter.

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