Imagine a world where you don’t have to study for your exams or prepare that much for your seminars and conferences. Imagine a world where the concept of “short-term memory” does not exist. Imagine a world where even complicated brain disorders, like amnesia, can be cured.

For thousands of years, the human brain has been an amazing mystery to all of us. Did you know that brain cells cannibalize themselves as a last ditch source of energy to ward off starvation? So, in essence, dieting can force your brain to eat itself. Even with our exponentially advancing technology, there are still significantly more things we don't know about the brain than we know about it. Of course, as human beings, we are bound to have a thirst for knowledge, thus, the Blue Brain Project.

The Blue Brain Project aims to reverse engineer the human brain and recreate it at a cellular level in a computer simulation. Its main mission is to use biologically-detailed reconstruc- tions and simulations of the mammalian brain to identify the fundamental principles of brain structure and functions.

The project’s initial goal, which was accomplished in December 2006, was the simulation of a rat neocortical column which is considered as the smallest functional unit of the neocortex. Neocortex is a part of the brain thought to be responsible for higher functions such as conscious thought. The first phase of the project ended in November 2007, delivering a data-driven process for creating, validating, and researching neocortical column.

The other goals of the project include creating a simulation on the molecular level, which allows the study of the effects of gene expression, and simulating a whole human neocortex by simplifying the column simulation to allow for parallel simulation of large numbers of connected columns.

The success of this project would be a scientific breakthrough. There would be a cure for Alzheimer’s DIsease and other brain disorders, and people will have a memory similar to a computer’s. This means that you can no longer have short-term memory - you don’t have to study for your exams anymore.

The Blue Brain Project’s cellular human brain is predicted possible by 2023. The project is headed by founding director Henry Markram and co-directed by Felix Schurmann and scientist Sean Hill.