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Human Brain Project; Blue Brain;Virtual BrainMichael A. PetersPublished online: 05 Apr 2013.

To cite this article: Michael A. Peters (2013) Human Brain Project; Blue Brain; Virtual Brain,Educational Philosophy and Theory, 45:8, 817-820, DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2013.781295

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EDITORIAL

Human Brain Project; Blue Brain; Virtual Brain

Flying from Los Angeles to Frankfurt recently to attend a conference in Marburg, I

picked up a newspaper to read on the flight. It was the Financial Times, an excellent

newspaper even though it sports views on the global economy to which I hardly ever

subscribe. Although the world is losing its newspapers to the Internet and the era of

speciality news, blogs and wikis, I was forced to reflect on the public goods they

produce and whether the new citizen journalism and social networking sites of the

digital age will be able to match the investigative stories and world reports that graced

the pages on the best papers.1 Be that as it may, what caught my eye was a story by

Clive Cookson called ‘Contours of the mind’ (Cookson, 2013).

The story profiled several brain projects currently handsomely funded as flagship

projects in Europe and the USA. Much to the chagrin of some of our prominent

contributors, I had sought out and commissioned a special issue on educational

neuroscience, edited by Kathryn E. Patten and Stephen R. Campbell from Simon

Fraser University. In an invited Editorial, Ivan Snook wrote a piece entitled ‘Educa-

tional neuroscience: A plea for radical scepticism’, outlining his dissatisfactions with

most of the papers that comprised the issue. In my Foreword to the Educational

Philosophy and Theory book series monograph, I provided some background on educa-

tional neuroscience laboratories set up at Simon Fraser, as well as at London,

Cambridge, Harvard and Bristol, and noted, in homage to Piaget and Francisco

Varela, how the science had progressed from making simple links between cognition

and biology to complementing cognitivism as an outgrowth of cybernetics with

emergence or connectionism.

After the ‘Decade of the Brain’ designated by President George Bush in the 1990s

‘to enhance public awareness of the benefits to be derived from brain research’

through ‘appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities’, the issue is firmly back on

the global research agenda.2 One commentator suggested:

The ‘decade of the brain’ generated an explosive growth of neuroscience research allover the world, mostly in the US, UK and Europe. This was helped by simultaneousdevelopment of a host of techniques and technologies permitting investigations fromthe molecular level to the study of intact human brain. It improved our understandingof the development, structure and function of the normal brain, pathogenesis of ahost of diseases and provided basis for rational therapy. It gave birth to new disci-plines of neuroscience like developmental neurobiology, neurogenetics, computational

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neuroscience, neuroinformatics, cognitive neuroscience, neural transplantation etc.The foundations laid down during this decade would, undoubtedly, provide aninvaluable insight into the most elusive riddle of brain–mind relationship on one handand appropriate therapy for a large number of incurable neurological disorders afflict-ing mankind. (Tandon, 2000, p. 199)

One must remember that the Decade of the Brain was largely a public awareness

campaign.

In his February 2013 State of the Union address, President Obama announced a

US $3 billion neuro-bid to build a map of brain activity.3 This will be a map of 10

billion neurons, as Clive Cook notes, ‘each connected to 10,000 others’ and techni-

cally known as the ‘functional connectome’ a research activity generating about

300,000 petabytes of data every year. As Alivisatos and his colleagues note:

The function of neural circuits is an emergent property that arises from the coordi-nated activity of large numbers of neurons. To capture this, we propose launching alarge scale, international public effort, the Brain Activity Map Project, aimed atreconstructing the full record of neural activity across complete neural circuits. Thistechnological challenge could prove to be an invaluable step toward understandingfundamental and pathological brain processes. (Alivisatos et al., 2012, p. 970)

The Human Brain Project (HBP) is a European Union ‘flagship’ project led by

researchers from the Ecole polytechnique federale de Lausanne and Heidelberg

University, receiving a billion euros over 10 years.4 The Executive Summary begins:

Understanding the human brain is one of the greatest challenges facing 21st centuryscience. If we can rise to the challenge, we can gain fundamental insights into whatit means to be human, develop new treatments for brain diseases, and build revolu-tionary new Information and Communications Technologies (ICT). In this report,we argue that the convergence between ICT and biology has reached a point atwhich it can turn this dream into reality. It was this realisation that motivated theauthors to launch the Human Brain Project–Preparatory Study (HBP-PS)–a one yearEU-funded Coordinating Action in which nearly three hundred experts in neurosci-ence, medicine and computing came together to develop a new ‘ICT-accelerated’vision for brain research and its applications. (http://www.humanbrainproject.eu/files/HBP_executive_summary.pdf)

At risk of over-quoting this material, I turn briefly to the stated goals:

The Human Brain Project should pursue four goals, each building on existing work,and acting as a catalyst for new research.

(1) Data: generate strategically selected data essential to seed brain atlases, build

brain models and catalyse contributions from other groups.

(2) Theory: identify mathematical principles underlying the relationships between

different levels of brain organisation and their role in the brain’s ability to

acquire, represent and store information.

(3) ICT platforms: provide an integrated system of ICT platforms offering services

to neuroscientists, clinical researchers and technology developers that accelerate

the pace of their research.

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(4) Applications: develop first draft models and prototype technologies, demonstrat-

ing how the platforms can be used to produce results with immediate value for

basic neuroscience, medicine and computing technology. (http://www.human-

brainproject.eu/files/HBP_executive_summary.pdf)

In both projects there is a focus on brain diseases which have obvious spin-off

educational impacts. In the HBP the further application to ICT, so-called ‘neuromor-

phic computing and neurorobotics’, ‘opens the road for the development of compact,

low-power systems with the long-term potential to achieve brain-like intelligence’. In

its simplest terms, ‘neuromorphic machines have the potential to be superior to von

Neumann machines’. In ‘The state of the art review’, a study that review over

400 papers, I note a sentence that predicts the impact on ‘society and individuals:

Better understanding of the interdependency between cerebral and social structurescould have a major positive impact on educational, social, legal and political struc-tures and institutions. In particular, the question of whether human beings canwillfully control their actions … has major implications for education and childcare… (http://www.humanbrainproject.eu/files/HBP_state_of_the_art_review.pdf)

Welcome to the brave new world of education! Since the 1960s, neuroscience has

morphed into a transdisciplinary mega-science brining together advances in molecular

biology with the neurosciences and information sciences, especially imaging technol-

ogy, which encouraged grand claims that we are finally at the door of identifying the

physical basis of mind. The scientific community is still a long way from realizing

these claims, but as they progress towards anatomizing the brain at different complex

levels it is clear that contemporary neuroscience has already begun to change

conceptions of personhood and also all those related social disciplines, including law,

anthropology, education and the humanities, that work off these conceptions.

Notes

1. See ‘In changing news landscape, even television is vulnerable: Trends in news con-sumption: 1991–2012’ from the Pew Center for the People and the Press at http://www.people-press.org/2012/09/27/in-changing-news-landscape-even-television-is-vulner-able/. The report indicates that newsreaders who depend upon the printed page are inraid decline, as are consumers who read printed magazines, while at the same timethere is an explosion in mobile audiences. The report indicates ‘there are now signs thattelevision news … also is increasingly vulnerable, as it may be losing its hold on thenext generation of news consumers’. This story has great currency in relation to ques-tions of news literacy among our students.

2. See The Project of the Decade of the Brain at http://www.loc.gov/loc/brain/3. See the related video at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/23/obamas-brain-activ-

ity-map_n_2747159.html4. See the official website at http://www.humanbrainproject.eu/

References

Alivisatos, A. P., Chun, M., Church, G. M., Greenspan, R. J., Roukes, M.L., & Yuste, R.

(2012). The brain activity map project and the challenge of functional connectomics.

Neuron, 74, 970–974.

Cookson, C. (2013, February 23–24). Contours of the mind. Financial Times, p. 5.

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Patten, K. E., & Campbell, S. R. (Eds.). (2011). Educational neuroscience [Special issue]. Edu-

cational Philosophy and Theory, 43.

Snook, I. (2012). Educational neuroscience: A plea for radical scepticism. Educational Philoso-

phy and Theory, 44, 445–449.

Tandon, P. N. (2000). The decade of the brain: A brief review. Neurology India, 48, 199–207.

Michael A. Peters

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