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 di

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.