Not a neuroscientist but final year med with a strong interest in neuro- This will certainly be useful for attempts to recreate the functionality of a brain in

Not a neuroscientist but final year med with a strong interest in neuro- This will certainly be useful for attempts to recreate the functionality of a brain in silico - big research efforts such as the blue brain project [1] have probably been using even early forms of this data. Having said that, in some ways it won't provide the useful information that will enable the functionality to be restored to the connections. heres why. Current efforts involving simulated brains rely both on older, less precise versions of what this nature article talks about - let's call that the roadmap, as it is a map of where all the neurons sit and where they connect to. This project drastically increases the resolution of this roadmap. However the additional information needed is what traffic is carried by each road. The brain as we understand it today consists not just of the connections between the neurons but also that each neuron, and each different network of the brain, secretes it's own neurotransmitter. Because some of these neurotransmitters are depolarising and some are inhibitory, and they connect widely across the brain and are much more closely related to the actual information processing, we need to have this information before we will be able to better approximate a brain. In all likelihood this is information gathering is probably underway right now. From what I understand the 'BigBrain' project aims to do for the human brain what the Allen Brain atlas did for mouse brains, that is not only provide a map of the connections but also stain for gene expression and (from memory) neurotransmitter presence. With this added information we will be closer to our goal of getting skynet sentient. [1] http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/ http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/