Military Plans to Create Artificial Cat Brain in Silico

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By way of Brain Stimulant Blog, this story reveals a complex effort by the US military to recreate a cat's cortical brain in silico. What will the military do with a silicon cat's brain?

Darpa, the Defense Department's way-out research arm, recently tapped is in late-stage negotiations with Malibu's HRL Laboratories to spearhead its Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics ("SyNAPSE") program. The goal: Build a chip with a "neuroscience-inspired architecture that can address a wide range of cognitive abilities -- perception, planning, decision making, and motor control," a company release notes. [UPDATE: An HRL spokesperson says the deal, in fact, "has not been finalized yet." The press release "should not have been sent out."]

The first nine-month phase of the program will focus on designing, fabricating, and characterizing synaptic and neural elements and combining them into a high-density, interconnecting microelectronic "fabric," which will be incorporated into a more complex system-level fabric design...

In the following 15-month phase, HRL [a joint venture between Boeing and General Motors] will combine the synaptic and neural elements to fabricate and demonstrate "cortical microcircuits" that can model various lower-level brain functions and actually "learn" by interacting with the environment.

"The follow-on phases of the project will create a technology that functions like the brain of a cat, which comprises 10^8 neurons and 10^12 synapses," Dr. Narayan Srinivasa, SyNAPSE Program Manager and Senior Scientist, said. "The human brain has roughly 10^11 neurons and 10^15 synapses."

The gray area between circuitry and gray matter has become one of the hotter topics in military research. The Army is funding a study into "synthetic telepathy" that would translate the brain's electrical activity into computer code. Darpa-funded researchers have taught monkeys how to control robotic limbs with their thoughts. Defense contractor Northrop Grumman is building binoculars that tap the unconscious mind. Honeywell has built a system that monitors pre-conscious neural firings, to help pick out targets in satellite imagery. The JASONs, the Pentagon's premiere scientific advisory board, has warned of the dangers of enemies implanted with brain-computer interfaces. And the Defense Intelligence Agency just released a report, saying the military needs to spend more on neuroscience - up to and including "mak[ing] the enemy obey our commands." _Wired

Other similar projects include the Blue Brain project, the Utah Brain Project, the China Brain Project (PDF), among others.

Interesting, but we are not at all close to the age of brain downloads. The critical component is timing. Brains are asynchronous, and timing is crucial for functional integration of information across different brain centers. We should learn something from all this.