Another "not a neuroscientist" - but I do have a slightly-more-than-layperson knowledge and interest in the area, and a degree in AI if that matters. "I'd love

Another "not a neuroscientist" - but I do have a slightly-more-than-layperson knowledge and interest in the area, and a degree in AI if that matters. "I'd love for a neuroscientist to weigh in on this - what is the possibility that something like this could be used to generate an artificial neural network which imitates, even crudely, the functions of the human brain?" Pretty much zero. Because it really just focussed on the organisation of the neurons, and ignores the complexity of the neurons themselves and the chemical/electrical/etc. communication between 'em. Neurons themselves are pretty complex beasts, and we're still learning things about them and the level of "processing" that is happening within neurons, as opposed to between 'em. For example as recently as ten years ago everybody knew that most of the computation was implicit in the neural connectivity of the synapses. We now know that there is significant computation within individual neurons - in the dendrites of all things (previously thought to be pretty much passive carriers of output from other cells - just wires basically). (See http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.neuro.28.061604.135703 http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.neuro.2... ). Don't get me wrong - it's useful work. But nowhere close to the level of detail needed to run people-sims.