Will Science Create A Computer With A Human Brain
August 12, 2009 by admin
Filed under Stories Of Interest
There are only a handful of scientific revolutions that would really change the world. An immortality pill would be one. A time machine would be another.
Faster-than-light travel, allowing the stars to be explored in a human lifetime, would be on the shortlist, too.
To my mind, however, the creation of an artificial mind would probably trump all of these – a development that would throw up an array of bewildering and complex moral and philosophical quandaries. Amazingly, it might also be within reach.
For while time machines, eternal life potions and Star Trek-style warp drives are as far away as ever, a team of scientists in Switzerland is claiming that a fully-functioning replica of a human brain could be built by 2020.
This isn’t just pie-in-the-sky. The Blue Brain project, led by computer genius Henry Markram – who is also the director of the Centre for Neuroscience & Technology and the Brain Mind Institute – has for the past five years been engineering the mammalian brain, the most complex object known in the Universe, using some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world.
Scientists Locate ‘God Spot’ in Human Brain
The brain of every human being, from believers to atheists, has been revealed to contain at least three “god spots”, all linked to religious beliefs and thoughts.
A team of U.S. researchers has obtained strong evidence that religiosity is managed by the same parts of the brain that are used every day to interpret other people’s moods and intentions and to analyze experiences.
Moreover, the spots exist in the brains of ordinary people, not just those whose extraordinary religious experiences have been triggered by brain injury or neurological conditions like epilepsy.
Scientists, philosophers and theologians have long argued about whether religious belief is a biological or a sociological phenomenon. Britain’s controversial evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins contends that religion is essentially a cultural virus, spread from brain to brain.
Others argue that it arises from the structure of the brain itself.
The new findings by researchers at the U.S. National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland — obtained by non-invasive brain scans of 26 Americans — have gone far to resolving the debate.
Jordan Grafman and his colleagues wrote in the U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the evolution of the brain networks that handle religious thoughts “was likely driven by their primary roles in social thinking, language and logical reasoning”.
According to University of NSW evolutionary biologist Rob Brooks, the study shows that religion taps into existing parts of the brain that evolved to handle complex social interactions.
I’m going to let the scientists in on a little secret… The real God spot is not in the brain, it’s in the heart.
