Clown imprints memory of brain programs

Organized at the end of March Human Brain Project (HBP) A closing conference In Marseille in the south of France. Work has been going on for ten years at a cost of one billion euros. The question arises: how will we remember Europe’s enormous investment in neuroscience?

I think the afterword is mostly about Henry Markram because stories about people of color have a unique ability to stick in the human brain. Unexpectedly.

Henry Markram is a brain researcher and speaks English influenced by his upbringing in South Africa. He is controversial among other things for making grand gestures to get money for his research. A Youtube clip from 2009 He stood before the stage at the Oxford Playhouse in Oxford, England and described his vision:

– Our goal is to create a detailed realistic computer model of the human brain.

The computer model becomes so similar to a real brain that it appears as a hologram and gives its own lecture.

And so far Pure imagination. Researchers know too little about how the human brain is structured to create a realistic computer simulation. Your brain contains approximately 86 billion nerve cells, which is on the same order of magnitude as the stars in our galaxy. And the connections between nerve cells – synapses – are several thousand times more numerous. No organ in the known universe is more complex than the human brain.

For a computer model to be realistic, it must simulate what is most central to our inner lives: subjective experiences. Today, no one even knows how to measure such mental phenomena.

Despite his ludicrous claims, Henry Markrum became the senior manager of The Human Brain Project when the project was launched in 2013. After that, I met him for an interview. Much of what he had to say was about how utterly failed traditional neuroscience was. It was easy to perceive him as arrogant.

But Henry Markram Has constantly moved between different roles. Outside of the spotlight, he is a respected researcher in neurophysiology and has found success as a co-founder of a scientific publishing house.

However, he failed as head of The Human Brain Project. Less than two years later, more than 800 brain scientists signed a protest against his leadership style. Henry Markram was fired.

Now the entire project is about to be completed. The scientists involved talk about advances in neuroinformatics, including methods that make it easier to compare results from different experiments where people are examined with a brain camera.

In time, it will surely become clear how this project contributed in other ways to the knowledge of the body’s most important organs. But it is already clear that the result differs significantly from what Henry Markram promised from the beginning.

I rewatch the clip of him standing on the Oxford Playhouse stage talking about his projects. It hurts. No sane brain scientist takes exaggerations seriously. However, he had to be arrested.

I want to believe Without this nonsense the politicians in Brussels would have invested in research into the brain without the need for rhetoric. Brain diseases are, above all, a huge burden on society in terms of both suffering and money.

But this confusion may be due to the EU Commission’s choice to invest in HBP as it competes fiercely with other projects. Henry Markham’s role in the limelight, then, was an unfortunate consequence of organizational origins. At the Oxford Playhouse, you could say he played the role of a clown, standing on a stage and acting proud. Since then I believe that the dialogue between researchers and politicians has become more honest. The debate about how to use our resources for better science is very important to clowns.