6

Building a Brain

When you visit the pioneers of the new world, like Jeff Bezos

or Bill Gates, you meet characters quite similar to Henry.

We live in an exciting and frightening time. It was chimed in by a technological revolution, like every new era. Humanity arguably underwent its greatest transformation when Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, giving everyone access to knowledge. People learned to read and then to write, and their way of thinking changed. This, in turn, changed how we did scientific research. In the Middle Ages, science was captured in pictures. Pictures can describe a lot at once. They depicted totalities. Writing cannot do that. Every aspect of a scientific concept must be explained, one after the other. Science became linear: it looked at specifics before arriving at a big picture.

One hundred and fifty years ago, the world experienced another great transformation. The steam and gasoline engine thrust us into the age of industrialization and economic pioneers. Cornelius Vanderbilt’s railroad, John D. Rockefeller’s oil, and Henry Ford’s conveyor belt changed the pace of the world. Machines replaced labor. The number and clout of blue-collar workers declined, and their children became skilled white-collar workers. Medicine changed along with the rest of the world. Great minds like Robert Koch and Paul Ehrlich defined this new epoch.

At the beginning of our era, there was the computer. In 1962, Marshall McLuhan’s famous “Gutenberg Galaxy” theory anticipated our electronic age, which he said would end both the Gutenberg era and the industrial era. Once again, entrepreneurs led the way. Like their predecessors, they are accumulating unbelievable wealth and frightening power. The pioneers and builders of this new world are called Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, Larry Page and Jeff Bezos.

Jobs and Gates saw this new world coming before anyone else. In the world they envisioned, there would be a computer in every house and every pocket. Page and Bezos, the founders of Google and Amazon, have since surpassed the Microsoft and Apple founders in terms of raw power, recognizing before anyone else how the internet would change our way of living and communicating, how it would set the pace of the world. Like Ford’s assembly lines, their algorithms are changing everything. Just as machines once replaced our hands, they are now replacing our minds, with white collars now facing the same fate as their blue-collar ancestors. A study by Oxford University predicts that by 2030, half of the current jobs in the United States will be redundant. Science will change and so will medicine.

The Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany’s most prestigious newspaper, sent me to meet some of these builders of the new world: Bezos, Gates, and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, whom Time magazine has anointed as the rightful successor to Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone. All three of these men have much in common with Henry. They understand technology like few others, are socially awkward and exceptionally smart, believe unconditionally in progress, and intend to change the world.

When you walk into the lobby of Amazon’s headquarters, you are greeted by a sign that reads: THERE’S SO MUCH LEFT TO INVENT. SO MANY NEW THINGS WILL HAPPEN. WE ARE IN NO PLACE YET TO FATHOM THE INTERNET’S IMPACT. IT’S STILL DAY ONE. The quote is from CEO Bezos, the richest person in the world.

“Jeff,” says Bill Gates, “is on par with Johannes Gutenberg.”

“Amazon,” Barack Obama said, “is the twenty-first century.”

Bezos has not only changed how we shop and how goods move around the world, but his corporation has grown into a global superpower. Nothing in the world can stop him, Bezos says. “What’s happening to bookstores isn’t Amazon. It’s the future.”

“We must realize that Amazon’s model, how they use data, is part of a major social transformation,” sociologist Colin Crouch says. Computers and data are the key to this new age. They combine the achievements of the Gutenberg age and industrialization: they are spreading human knowledge. They utilize the power of machines—their thinking power this time, artificial intelligence. Like in Ehrlich’s time, these new tools will revolutionize medicine and help us cure diseases that once seemed unbeatable.

I recently traveled to Silicon Valley to meet Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun, the inventor of Google Glass and Google cars, an engineer, not a scientist. With the help of his Stanford colleagues, he recently invented an app that diagnoses skin cancer and apparently does so more reliably than seasoned dermatologists. A computer’s eye and brain can compute so much more than we can fathom.

Henry saw the rise of technology in medicine coming early on. The kind of run-of-the-mill diagnosis he hated doing in medical school is one of the first jobs that computers will take away from doctors. Pioneers will find a way to make money off this development. To Henry, their real value lay elsewhere. He was convinced that mankind could not begin to cure the big disorders and diseases of the mind, be it autism, schizophrenia, or Alzheimer’s until we began to understand the brain in its totality.

Henry explains: “We must understand the synergy between diseases. Autism has a lot of symptoms in common with other disorders. Thirty percent of autistic people have seizures like epileptics. What disease has most in common with autism? Is it Alzheimer’s? Parkinson’s? Depression? Psychosis? Migraine? No one knows, because no one knows how they’re all related. Clinics all over the world have the data on this. You could connect them via a network. What works for one disorder also affects other disorders. Progress on any one of these diseases could advance the research on all of them. That’s the accelerant we need. In Europe today, there are 30 million people with mental disorders. We have their data: their genes, blood values, brain scans, their complete case histories. If we could connect it, the state of our collective knowledge would change overnight. Of course, you have to consider data privacy. I have suggested such a project, but the scientific community doesn’t want to hear about it. It isn’t urgent to them, because they have no autistic children.”

Scientists prefer to continue researching according to the established methods. This means that everyone’s in their own lane, publishing their own data. When their research is complete, they write a paper that identifies them as the author, their careers advance, even if their work disappears into a remote archive. Every year, a hundred thousand papers are published in Henry’s field alone. He couldn’t read all those papers on synapses if he tried. How much better would it be if all that knowledge were shared, if all the data flowed into a single database? What if all that occurred before the experiments were even over, so dozens of scientists didn’t end up doing the exact same research?

Naturally, it isn’t enough to just collect the data and assemble it. That’s the old, linear way of thinking. If you tried to build the brain that way, it would take hundreds of years. No, the computer would have to think in pictures, as scientists did pre-Gutenberg. Henry would have to simulate the brain, build it on spec, and improve it with the help of data as it becomes available. Like an incredibly difficult crossword puzzle, you wouldn’t collect letters one by one, form one word after another, and plug them all in when they’re complete. You start with the big picture, then you insert, consult, and correct. That’s the only way to solve the mystery in our lifetime instead of leaving it for our grandchildren to figure out.

And yes, once the brain was simulated, in the not-so-distant future, he would help Kai.

It’s July 22, 2009, a TED conference in Oxford. There are countless conferences in the world, many of them important, some of them meaningful, but only two are considered the gold standard: the World Economic Forum at Davos and the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference.

Observers who want to understand the status quo look to Davos. To the future-minded, TED is the measure of all things. Some of our greatest thought leaders have graced the famous stage: Jobs, Gates, Page, Stephen Hawking, Nobel Laureate in Medicine James Watson, neuroscientist extraordinaire Michael Merzenich. On this July day, it’s Henry Markram’s turn. The organizers have announced him as our “most promising frontiersman.” The auditorium is full; Henry’s first sentence already sends a murmur through the crowd.

Our mission is to build a detailed, realistic computer model of the human brain. Why are we doing this? First, it’s essential to understand the human brain, if we do want to get along in society. I think this is a key step in evolution. The second reason is: we can’t keep doing animal experiments forever. We have to embody all our data, all our knowledge into a working model. It’s like a Noah’s Ark. Like an archive. The third reason is the two billion people on the planet that are affected by a mental disorder. The drugs they use today are largely empirical. I think we can come up with very concrete solutions how to treat them.

Henry takes a deep breath.

He was finally honoring the vow he had made after his sabbatical, to help Kai on a large and on a small scale. After years of preparation, in May 2005, he had launched his Blue Brain Project at the EFPL in Lausanne. Now he has fifteen minutes to explain it all. More than a million people will watch his remarks.

He begins, of course, with the brain.

It took the universe eleven billion years to build the brain. The real big step was the neocortex. It’s a new brain. Mammals needed it because they had to cope with parenthood, social interactions, complex cognitive functions. You can think of the neocortex as the ultimate solution. The neocortex is still evolving at an enormous speed. We ran out of space in the skull, and the brain started to fold in on itself, in columns. You can think of the neocortex as a massive grand piano with millions of keys. Each of these neocortical columns produces a note. When stimulated, it produces a symphony: your reality.

There is a new theory of autism called the “Intense World Theory,” which suggests that neocortical columns are “super columns”; they are highly reactive and super plastic. Autistic people have a capacity for learning that is unthinkable to us. But if you have a disease within one of these columns, the perception is going to be corrupted.

Understanding these columns, Henry continues, would solve the mystery of what reality is—our reality and the reality of autistic people.

In 2007, the Blue Brain Project achieved an interim goal: simulating the neocortical column of a rat. A column is a miniature brain, which by itself can process blurred impressions of our environment.

For that simulation, Henry and his team had to re-create nerve cells. Mathematics helped them in that effort, specifically the equations of two Nobel Prize winners, and the supercomputer that could do hundreds of billions of calculations per minute certainly didn’t hurt. One laptop performed the calculations of a single nerve cell. A network of ten thousand laptops made up the whole column, stacked to roughly the size of a refrigerator. A supercomputer for a single column. Henry uploaded the neurons, every single one, and watched them work. It was fascinating: without any help, the nerve cells became attuned to each other, sending signals back and forth. Their exchanges looked like swarms of birds, darting to and fro.

Henry had written his lecture only hours before his appearance on the TED stage. He only got nervous when he entered the auditorium and saw Cameron Diaz in the crowd. Henry looked down, sweat on his forehead. He had no way of knowing how exciting this project had yet to become. Four years later, the European Commission would anoint it as one of its flagship projects, pledging 1.2 billion euros of funding over ten years. They renamed it the Human Brain Project. In ten years, Henry declared at the official announcement of their victory, they would have simulated the human brain.