Blue Brain Project

The goal of the Blue Brain Project is to build biologically detailed digital reconstructions and simulations of the rodent, and ultimately the human brain. The supercomputer-based reconstructions and simulations built by the project offer a radically new approach for understanding the multilevel structure and function of the brain. The project's novel research strategy exploits interdependencies in the experimental data to obtain dense maps of the brain, without measuring every detail of its multiple levels of organization (molecules, cells, micro-circuits, brain regions, the whole brain). This strategy allows the project to build digital reconstructions (computer models) of the brain at an unprecedented level of biological detail. Supercomputer-based simulation of their behavior turns understanding the brain into a tractable problem, providing a new tool to study the complex interactions within different levels of brain organization and to investigate the cross-level links leading from genes to cognition.