8 ms·

Why the Human Brain Project Went Wrong and How to Fix It

93 points by wrongc0ntinent 11y ago

Moshe_Silnorin 11y ago
>While he was still in Germany, his son Kai had been diagnosed with autism. As he told The Guardian in 2013, he wanted “to be able to step inside a simulation of my son's brain and see the world as he sees it.” This is a beautiful sentiment.
- taneq 11y ago
  Or terrifying, if you consider that a simulation of his son's brain is, in a very real sense, his son. And that when he shuts that simulation down he's killing it.
  - orbifold 11y ago
    The Human Brain Project does not actually try to create a realistic human brain, instead it tries to randomly generate neurons and synapses whose statistical distribution matches those of the different kinds of neurons observed in the human brain. While this is utterly useless for things like intelligence or learning (both of which are wildly unrealistic given the simulation speed of the software system), for things like autism, parkinson which go along with abnormally distributed brain patterns it could still be very useful. I think beyond the fact that Markram probably oversold the project, the project also suffers from a clash of cultures. In fields physics and other branches of natural science it has long been a given to do simulations instead of experiments once one was reasonably sure how things worked. In the case of the Human Brain Project if the software is architected in the right way additional insights in how synapses and neurons worked and how they are connected could be incorporated over time. Obviously you wouldn't understand conciousness or learning this way, at least not right away, but solely relying on experiments, won't get you there either, since they can only deal with dozens of neurons and not much more.
streptomycin 11y ago
I was never satisfied with their explanation for why they had to start with the human brain rather than the brain of a MUCH simpler organism like C. elegans.
- gohrt 11y ago
  The reason was obviously hubris combined with marketing spice appeal. http://nemaload.davidad.org/ http://nemaload.davidad.org/
  - streptomycin 11y ago
    Interesting link, but no update since 2013? Is it dead? There's also http://www.openworm.org/ http://www.openworm.org/
    - plonh 11y ago
      It was Dalrymple's site. His work was open source and collaborated with OpenWorm researchers. Looks like Dalrymple gave up to go work for Twitter. I guess he found a way to leverage his expertise in studying very small brains. Sigh. Greatest minds of our generation, yadda yadda. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Dalrymple_(computer_scientist) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Dalrymple_(computer_sc...
- themgt 11y ago
  Exactly. So much of neuroscience is still in "unknown unknown" phase, and the idea of just doing this massive interdisciplinary project to simulate a full human brain, built on the pile of sand that is any sort of "theory" of full-brain simulation ... it's like dedicating $1 billion to some dude's unpublished idea of proving P = NP. Bullshit should have been called before this ever got off the drawing board. Sure seems like the EU has it's fair share of incompetent technocrats if you can throw $1 billion at some nonsense any handful of PhDs in the field could have told you was nonsense if you'd just picked up a phone.
  - evgen 11y ago
paulsutter 11y ago
Like any project, I'm sure there are many ways it can be improved. Still, I'd much rather see $1B spent imperfectly on something important - a thousand times over - rather than a trillion plus on the F-35, or so many of the ways governments spend money.
- simonh 11y ago
  No results from a wahatever effort is still axwaste no matter how wonderful the payoff might have been. This goes to the heart of why efforts like this get funding in the first place. The funding committees get blinded by the bright light of the potential payoff, and the money gets wasted instead of going to fund and actualy deliver valuable projects that aren't as glitzy. But at least you would have ended up with a real actual benefit.
  - IanCal 11y ago
    > No results from a wahatever effort is still axwaste no matter how wonderful the payoff might have been. That's easy to say with hindsight. No results from putting money into something doesn't mean you made the wrong choice. That might be the case here, but as a general statement it's really quite dangerously wrong.
  - IanCal 11y ago
    > No results from a wahatever effort is still axwaste no matter how wonderful the payoff might have been. That's easy to say with hindsight. No results from putting money into something doesn't mean you made the wrong choice. That might be the case here, but as a general statement it's really quite dangerously wrong.
  - PhasmaFelis 11y ago
    > No results from a wahatever effort is still axwaste no matter how wonderful the payoff might have been. That's only true from a cynically commercial standpoint. From a scientific standpoint, negative results are every bit as important as positive ones. As Edison said, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." (Which isn't to say that we shouldn't consider the likelihood of valuable results, positive or negative, in relation to the time, money, and effort spent, just that there are important considerations besides commercial payoff potential.)
ktRolster 11y ago
IBM started questioning their funding of the project because of the lack of a success criteria. It's cool that you have many calculations running in parallel on a super computer, and each calculation is a simplified model of a neuron, but how do you know when you've actually replicated a brain? A brain is more than a collection of neurons, they need to be connected and do something.
freshhawk 11y ago
This passage really distills it down to the essence of what happened: "Despite skepticism in the neuroscience community, Markram won over the people who really mattered: funders at the European Commission, who seem to have looked less closely at the proposal's scientific feasibility than at its potential economic and political payoff."
- rndn 11y ago
  There is a great recent Omega Tau episode on the reasons why mega projects often fail: http://omegataupodcast.net/2015/09/181-why-megaprojects-fail-and-what-to-do-about-it/ http://omegataupodcast.net/2015/09/181-why-megaprojects-fail...
  - Houshalter 11y ago
    Most ambitious projects fail, period. Most startups don't succeed. I don't know if size is the issue. I don't think a high failure rate even matters. If only 10% of billion dollar projects succeed, then spending $10 billion should get you something equivalent to a working human brain simulation. And hopefully at least something is learned from the failures. Even they don't succeed at building a human brain doesn't mean they don't learn anything.
    - wpietri 11y ago
      The interesting question for me is how to buy those 9/10 failures more cheaply. Can we get our $1 billion failures for only $100m each? Or even $10 million? Then we can buy a lot more successes. I think the main barrier there, though, is that funders have to be in favor of interesting failure. With the described mega-science funding project, there's a big incentive to come up with dramatic plans that are novel and promise certain success. I think the tech industry isn't perfect at this; we can all name companies that spent way too much money for what they learned. But our FFF/seed/A/B funding model gets us a good discount on interesting failures.
    - rndn 11y ago
      You've got no clue what you are talking about, do you? The thing is that many mega projects fail because of ridiculous reasons; mostly because high ranking people make dicisions outside the range of their expertise. Startup projects have very different characteristics and different stakeholders (i.e. mostly private). If 90% of the money could be saved then that's pretty bad.
hyperion2010 11y ago
I might go so far as to say that the issue isn't with the management structure so much as the complete lack of a management structure. It takes a well run and managed organization to spend a billion euros effectively.
amatic 11y ago
John Cleese, of all people, summarized our current knowledge of the nervous system best in this video: https://youtu.be/FQjgsQ5G8ug?t=20 https://youtu.be/FQjgsQ5G8ug?t=20 We are clueless. A lot of what is published is just neurobabble, even in 'serious' journals. As others have pointed out, we still don't even know how to simulate a brain of a tiny worm with 302 neurons. Talking about simulating billions of neurons is beyond fantasy, and funding such a projects is.. well.. not surprising from politicians, but that is another matter. Similarly, a lot of scientists are researching themes like 'consciousness' and 'executive functions' and still don't know how to make a robot walk like a normal person on two feet. We should be concentrating on trying to understand the simple stuff - the reflex arc, muscle control, grasping, and pointing a finger toward something.
- aggerdmon 11y ago
  [Ok, I just saw in another one of you're posts your MA involved perceptual control theory, so yah, right on. I have this written already and feel a little silly now, but I figure the links are good and worth posting.] I am finishing up my undergraduate right now in psychology, and while I want to defend the work that is being done by cognitive psychologists on concepts at higher levels of abstraction (Many researchers working in more mathematical areas of psychology tend towards working on things like consciousness, perception, concepts and categorization. There are cool advances in it, but I won't go too much into it in this post. I guess I'm just trying to say that you end up working with constructs that have higher barriers of entry to communicating outside of groups of researchers who get excited about modeling and the perceptual measurement theory.) I digress with that though. The main reason I wanted to comment is that your comment on understanding things like pointing hit on one of my favorite areas of psychology that has tragically always been somewhat nitch, but provides a lot of interesting connections between different areas if you take the time to get into it. There is a thread in the field of psychology that does just this kind of research, termed sometimes ecological psychology. It is often referred to colloquially as Gibsonian psychology, termed after [JJ Gibson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_J._Gibson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_J._Gibson) who is seen as the father of the field(its practitioner's are known colloquially as Gibsonians). I was lucky enough to take the Geoffrey Bingham's (who specializes reach to grasp behavior iirc) Perception/Action course a few years back, and found it immensely rewarding.* The primary text for the course was JJ Gibson's classic book "The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception". The philosophical foundations of gibsons theory of affordances is to take a realist approach to perception. (Avoiding the troubles that mind-body dualism imposes; taking a more Heidegerrian approach). The classic mantra of the field is ask not what is in you're mind, but what you're mind is in. I wish I had time to say more now, but I need to run here. But I'll leave you with a few snippets of what I took away from the course, and some links I think you'll enjoy, and can furnish more if you would be interested. The Archival Gibson Video Series (Whoever assembled these had perfect choice in music) [Reversibility and event perception](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwVLny6Ymsk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwVLny6Ymsk) [Optical Transitions:Visible To Invisible](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qQLtIICXoE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qQLtIICXoE) [Motion Paralax and Percieved Depth](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVSaWXqQh0w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVSaWXqQh0w) Disclaimer I haven't watched this video, but the idea that perception of throw-ability may explain size weight illusions is a surprising one. [Geoff Bingham - Haptics: throwing and the size-weight illusion](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud9JB4NYUvA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud9JB4NYUvA) * I really need to digitize those notes... Btw: Awesome Arm.
g7635629 11y ago
I think this is the Spanish talkshow mentioned in the post which is quite a tl;dr for what went wrong with HBP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhsZll_P1iA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhsZll_P1iA
Gatsky 11y ago
In the current era, technological advances are far more important to progress in the life sciences than ideas or analytical/computational methods. The cycle of innovation is quite fast. The human genome project is a classic example. Celera genomics came out with a a totally new DNA sequencing technology towards the end of the HGP, and managed to sequence the human genome in a fraction of the time. It so happens that the HGP had enough of a head start to release their data at the same time, and that their data and Celera's data were complementary in many ways. But imagine if the HGP started 5 years later, and Celera released their complete genome when HGP had only done 50%? It too would be considered a grand failure. A grand project needs to be timed very carefully. Even the ones that actually work well will be obsolete by their completion unless they happen to occur in the right part of the technology cycle.
rasz_pl 11y ago
TLDR: 800 scientists: We Jelly JO! How come one asshole gets 1.3B euro for his project and can decide how to spend it? Lets collectively shit on him. There is no substantive critique cited in this article, only scientists whining about management structure.
skimpycompiler 11y ago
A 10 part documentary is being made by film director Noah Hutton, with each installment detailing the year-long workings of the project at the EPFL. Having started filming in 2009, the documentary is planned to be released in 2020, after the years of filming and editiang have finished. Regular contributions from Henry Markram and the rest of the team provide an insight into the Blue Brain Project, while similar research tasks across the world are touched on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Brain_Project#Documentary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Brain_Project#Documentary This is going to be very interesting.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

>While he was still in Germany, his son Kai had been diagnosed with autism. As he told The Guardian in 2013, he wanted “to be able to step inside a simulation of my son's brain and see the world as he sees it.” This is a beautiful sentiment.

taneq 11y ago
Or terrifying, if you consider that a simulation of his son's brain is, in a very real sense, his son. And that when he shuts that simulation down he's killing it.
- orbifold 11y ago
  The Human Brain Project does not actually try to create a realistic human brain, instead it tries to randomly generate neurons and synapses whose statistical distribution matches those of the different kinds of neurons observed in the human brain. While this is utterly useless for things like intelligence or learning (both of which are wildly unrealistic given the simulation speed of the software system), for things like autism, parkinson which go along with abnormally distributed brain patterns it could still be very useful. I think beyond the fact that Markram probably oversold the project, the project also suffers from a clash of cultures. In fields physics and other branches of natural science it has long been a given to do simulations instead of experiments once one was reasonably sure how things worked. In the case of the Human Brain Project if the software is architected in the right way additional insights in how synapses and neurons worked and how they are connected could be incorporated over time. Obviously you wouldn't understand conciousness or learning this way, at least not right away, but solely relying on experiments, won't get you there either, since they can only deal with dozens of neurons and not much more.

streptomycin 11y ago

I was never satisfied with their explanation for why they had to start with the human brain rather than the brain of a MUCH simpler organism like C. elegans.

gohrt 11y ago
The reason was obviously hubris combined with marketing spice appeal. http://nemaload.davidad.org/ http://nemaload.davidad.org/
- streptomycin 11y ago
  Interesting link, but no update since 2013? Is it dead? There's also http://www.openworm.org/ http://www.openworm.org/
  - plonh 11y ago
    It was Dalrymple's site. His work was open source and collaborated with OpenWorm researchers. Looks like Dalrymple gave up to go work for Twitter. I guess he found a way to leverage his expertise in studying very small brains. Sigh. Greatest minds of our generation, yadda yadda. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Dalrymple_(computer_scientist) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Dalrymple_(computer_sc...
themgt 11y ago
Exactly. So much of neuroscience is still in "unknown unknown" phase, and the idea of just doing this massive interdisciplinary project to simulate a full human brain, built on the pile of sand that is any sort of "theory" of full-brain simulation ... it's like dedicating $1 billion to some dude's unpublished idea of proving P = NP. Bullshit should have been called before this ever got off the drawing board. Sure seems like the EU has it's fair share of incompetent technocrats if you can throw $1 billion at some nonsense any handful of PhDs in the field could have told you was nonsense if you'd just picked up a phone.
- evgen 11y ago

paulsutter 11y ago

Like any project, I'm sure there are many ways it can be improved. Still, I'd much rather see $1B spent imperfectly on something important - a thousand times over - rather than a trillion plus on the F-35, or so many of the ways governments spend money.

simonh 11y ago
No results from a wahatever effort is still axwaste no matter how wonderful the payoff might have been. This goes to the heart of why efforts like this get funding in the first place. The funding committees get blinded by the bright light of the potential payoff, and the money gets wasted instead of going to fund and actualy deliver valuable projects that aren't as glitzy. But at least you would have ended up with a real actual benefit.
- IanCal 11y ago
  > No results from a wahatever effort is still axwaste no matter how wonderful the payoff might have been. That's easy to say with hindsight. No results from putting money into something doesn't mean you made the wrong choice. That might be the case here, but as a general statement it's really quite dangerously wrong.
- IanCal 11y ago
  > No results from a wahatever effort is still axwaste no matter how wonderful the payoff might have been. That's easy to say with hindsight. No results from putting money into something doesn't mean you made the wrong choice. That might be the case here, but as a general statement it's really quite dangerously wrong.
- PhasmaFelis 11y ago
  > No results from a wahatever effort is still axwaste no matter how wonderful the payoff might have been. That's only true from a cynically commercial standpoint. From a scientific standpoint, negative results are every bit as important as positive ones. As Edison said, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." (Which isn't to say that we shouldn't consider the likelihood of valuable results, positive or negative, in relation to the time, money, and effort spent, just that there are important considerations besides commercial payoff potential.)

ktRolster 11y ago

IBM started questioning their funding of the project because of the lack of a success criteria. It's cool that you have many calculations running in parallel on a super computer, and each calculation is a simplified model of a neuron, but how do you know when you've actually replicated a brain? A brain is more than a collection of neurons, they need to be connected and do something.

freshhawk 11y ago

This passage really distills it down to the essence of what happened: "Despite skepticism in the neuroscience community, Markram won over the people who really mattered: funders at the European Commission, who seem to have looked less closely at the proposal's scientific feasibility than at its potential economic and political payoff."

rndn 11y ago
There is a great recent Omega Tau episode on the reasons why mega projects often fail: http://omegataupodcast.net/2015/09/181-why-megaprojects-fail-and-what-to-do-about-it/ http://omegataupodcast.net/2015/09/181-why-megaprojects-fail...
- Houshalter 11y ago
  Most ambitious projects fail, period. Most startups don't succeed. I don't know if size is the issue. I don't think a high failure rate even matters. If only 10% of billion dollar projects succeed, then spending $10 billion should get you something equivalent to a working human brain simulation. And hopefully at least something is learned from the failures. Even they don't succeed at building a human brain doesn't mean they don't learn anything.
  - wpietri 11y ago
    The interesting question for me is how to buy those 9/10 failures more cheaply. Can we get our $1 billion failures for only $100m each? Or even $10 million? Then we can buy a lot more successes. I think the main barrier there, though, is that funders have to be in favor of interesting failure. With the described mega-science funding project, there's a big incentive to come up with dramatic plans that are novel and promise certain success. I think the tech industry isn't perfect at this; we can all name companies that spent way too much money for what they learned. But our FFF/seed/A/B funding model gets us a good discount on interesting failures.
  - rndn 11y ago
    You've got no clue what you are talking about, do you? The thing is that many mega projects fail because of ridiculous reasons; mostly because high ranking people make dicisions outside the range of their expertise. Startup projects have very different characteristics and different stakeholders (i.e. mostly private). If 90% of the money could be saved then that's pretty bad.

hyperion2010 11y ago

I might go so far as to say that the issue isn't with the management structure so much as the complete lack of a management structure. It takes a well run and managed organization to spend a billion euros effectively.

amatic 11y ago

John Cleese, of all people, summarized our current knowledge of the nervous system best in this video: https://youtu.be/FQjgsQ5G8ug?t=20 https://youtu.be/FQjgsQ5G8ug?t=20 We are clueless. A lot of what is published is just neurobabble, even in 'serious' journals. As others have pointed out, we still don't even know how to simulate a brain of a tiny worm with 302 neurons. Talking about simulating billions of neurons is beyond fantasy, and funding such a projects is.. well.. not surprising from politicians, but that is another matter. Similarly, a lot of scientists are researching themes like 'consciousness' and 'executive functions' and still don't know how to make a robot walk like a normal person on two feet. We should be concentrating on trying to understand the simple stuff - the reflex arc, muscle control, grasping, and pointing a finger toward something.

aggerdmon 11y ago
[Ok, I just saw in another one of you're posts your MA involved perceptual control theory, so yah, right on. I have this written already and feel a little silly now, but I figure the links are good and worth posting.] I am finishing up my undergraduate right now in psychology, and while I want to defend the work that is being done by cognitive psychologists on concepts at higher levels of abstraction (Many researchers working in more mathematical areas of psychology tend towards working on things like consciousness, perception, concepts and categorization. There are cool advances in it, but I won't go too much into it in this post. I guess I'm just trying to say that you end up working with constructs that have higher barriers of entry to communicating outside of groups of researchers who get excited about modeling and the perceptual measurement theory.) I digress with that though. The main reason I wanted to comment is that your comment on understanding things like pointing hit on one of my favorite areas of psychology that has tragically always been somewhat nitch, but provides a lot of interesting connections between different areas if you take the time to get into it. There is a thread in the field of psychology that does just this kind of research, termed sometimes ecological psychology. It is often referred to colloquially as Gibsonian psychology, termed after [JJ Gibson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_J._Gibson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_J._Gibson) who is seen as the father of the field(its practitioner's are known colloquially as Gibsonians). I was lucky enough to take the Geoffrey Bingham's (who specializes reach to grasp behavior iirc) Perception/Action course a few years back, and found it immensely rewarding.* The primary text for the course was JJ Gibson's classic book "The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception". The philosophical foundations of gibsons theory of affordances is to take a realist approach to perception. (Avoiding the troubles that mind-body dualism imposes; taking a more Heidegerrian approach). The classic mantra of the field is ask not what is in you're mind, but what you're mind is in. I wish I had time to say more now, but I need to run here. But I'll leave you with a few snippets of what I took away from the course, and some links I think you'll enjoy, and can furnish more if you would be interested. The Archival Gibson Video Series (Whoever assembled these had perfect choice in music) [Reversibility and event perception](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwVLny6Ymsk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwVLny6Ymsk) [Optical Transitions:Visible To Invisible](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qQLtIICXoE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qQLtIICXoE) [Motion Paralax and Percieved Depth](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVSaWXqQh0w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVSaWXqQh0w) Disclaimer I haven't watched this video, but the idea that perception of throw-ability may explain size weight illusions is a surprising one. [Geoff Bingham - Haptics: throwing and the size-weight illusion](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud9JB4NYUvA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud9JB4NYUvA) * I really need to digitize those notes... Btw: Awesome Arm.

g7635629 11y ago

I think this is the Spanish talkshow mentioned in the post which is quite a tl;dr for what went wrong with HBP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhsZll_P1iA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhsZll_P1iA

Gatsky 11y ago

In the current era, technological advances are far more important to progress in the life sciences than ideas or analytical/computational methods. The cycle of innovation is quite fast. The human genome project is a classic example. Celera genomics came out with a a totally new DNA sequencing technology towards the end of the HGP, and managed to sequence the human genome in a fraction of the time. It so happens that the HGP had enough of a head start to release their data at the same time, and that their data and Celera's data were complementary in many ways. But imagine if the HGP started 5 years later, and Celera released their complete genome when HGP had only done 50%? It too would be considered a grand failure. A grand project needs to be timed very carefully. Even the ones that actually work well will be obsolete by their completion unless they happen to occur in the right part of the technology cycle.

rasz_pl 11y ago

TLDR: 800 scientists: We Jelly JO! How come one asshole gets 1.3B euro for his project and can decide how to spend it? Lets collectively shit on him. There is no substantive critique cited in this article, only scientists whining about management structure.

skimpycompiler 11y ago

A 10 part documentary is being made by film director Noah Hutton, with each installment detailing the year-long workings of the project at the EPFL. Having started filming in 2009, the documentary is planned to be released in 2020, after the years of filming and editiang have finished. Regular contributions from Henry Markram and the rest of the team provide an insight into the Blue Brain Project, while similar research tasks across the world are touched on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Brain_Project#Documentary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Brain_Project#Documentary This is going to be very interesting.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]