THE first attempt to build a complete simulation of the human brain has begun.

On 6 June, IBM and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne announced the launch of the Blue Brain Project, an attempt to model the entire electrical circuitry of the brain using a supercomputer based on IBM's Blue Gene design.

Drawing on more than 10 years' worth of biological observations of how the brain's 10 billion neurons behave individually and how they are wired together, the simulation will give scientists an opportunity to study how parts of the brain respond to different stimuli. The hope is that the virtual brain will help our understanding of aspects of human cognition, such as perception and memory, as well as how malfunctioning neurons can cause psychiatric disorders such as autism and schizophrenia.