Putting your brain on a microchip

... about 80 percent of the brain and governs high-level thinking and function. Scientists say the neocortex is a model for cognitive computing because it's fast, flexible and robust — desirable attributes for a computing system.

The Blue Brain project, a collaboration of IBM and the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, in Lausanne, Switzerland, recently simulated the firing of 10,000 neurons in a single column in the neocortex using IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer. It is looking for additional supercomputers to process more data.

Stanford University professor of bioengineering Kwabena Boahen said this week that his team has designed a "neurogrid", a large system using several copies of the same neuromorphic chip that models the different layers and interactions of the brain. He said his two-year goal is to emulate a million neurons in the cortex. (The human brain has an estimated 10 billion neurons, which can be lost as people age.)

Theodore Berger, a professor of biomedical engineering and neurobiology at the University of Southern California, talked about his work developing biomedical electronics that can be used to replace brain damage — tools called implantable biomimetic electronics. He's specifically working on the circuitry of the brain that's responsible for forming long-term memories, called the hypothalamus.

He said the brain processes information in terms of spatio-temporal patterns, meaning it processes information visually in reference to space and time and in a nonlinear fashion. To predict the output of damaged neurons, his work is to develop a history of input and action potentials, or the "input pattern", he said. The end result will be a device that can sit on a patient's head and interact electrochemically with the brain, replacing the damaged piece of the neocortex.

Hawkins' theories also rely on the idea of the brain as a pattern-recognising machine. He bases his notion on a theory of a common cortical algorithm that underlies all function of the brain, meaning we process playing a game like Scrabble the same way we might learn a language.

"It's dark in there; it's just patterns computed into the brain," Hawkins said. "We have to think about patterns."

In simplest terms, HTM consists of a "hierarchy of causes" from the world, or memory nodes; infers what a cause might be, based on informational input to the machine; predicts the future based on expectations from the causes; then directs motor behavior from the predictions.

Following Hawkins' talk at the conference, someone from the audience expressed doubt about his theories and suggested he "stick with the Treo".

"That's fine," Hawkins replied, "but I'm still going to work on it."