A few weeks ago, I led a group of our students on a trip to a Science Cafe, hosted by Winston Churchill High School. The topic, presented by Dr. Naweed Syed, had to do with the interface between the human brain and the silcon chip.
On a not unrelated topic, researchers in Germany and Switzerland, have built a full scale simulation of the human brain on a silcon chip.
From Technology Review, a chip simulates the learning capabilities of the human brain:
An international team of scientists in Europe has created a silicon chip designed to function like a human brain. With 200,000 neurons linked up by 50 million synaptic connections, the chip is able to mimic the brain’s ability to learn more closely than any other machine.
Although the chip has a fraction of the number of neurons or connections found in a brain, its design allows it to be scaled up, says Karlheinz Meier, a physicist at Heidelberg University, in Germany, who has coordinated the Fast Analog Computing with Emergent Transient States project, or FACETS.
I’ll be sending an email to Dr. Syed with this link to see how this research might influence his own work. Stay tuned.
