IBM researchers have astonished themselves by running a computer simulation of the brain and finding that it produced electrical waves resembling those in the brain itself, holding out the hope of much more advanced simulations of brain activity than was previously possible: in particular the work could shed light on epilepsy and on the formation of memories, because the simulation was of the activity of the hippocampus, the area of the brain where those activities occur; the work by IBM scientist Roger Traub and Columbia University researchers Richard Miles and Robert K S Wong – imitated the activity of a slice of a guinea pig’s hippocampus containing 10,000 cells still tiny in comparison with the millions making up a human hippocampus; the 3090 with Vectors fitted required several hours of computation to produce a few seconds’ simulation.
