IBM – The Race to Reverse Engineer the Human Brain

In an unprecedented undertaking, IBM Research and five leading universities are partnering to create computing systems that are expected to simulate and emulate the brains abilities for sensation, perception, action, interaction and cognition while rivaling its low power consumption and compact size.

Science has come a long way in understanding the bodys central nervous system, but the way our brains work – the fact that we recognize patterns and base our thoughts and ideas on past experiences, for example – remains largely a mystery. Understanding the process behind these effortless feats of the human brain and creating a computational theory based on it is one of the biggest and most fundamental challenges for computer scientists today, and IBM researchers are one step closer to making this quest a reality.