Whole Brain Emulation
Running a measured brain on a computer with its dynamics intact.
Using Connectome-seq, a team mapped more than 1,000 neurons in a mouse brain circuit known as the pontocerebellar circuit with single-synapse resolution—a capability that doesn't exist in any current technology. The team is confident that improvements already underway can eventually reach the goal of mapping the whole mouse brain, directly addressing the parameter inference bottleneck for mammalian emulation.
Dr. Greg Fahy published results from a decade-stored human brain (cryobiologist L. Stephen Coles, died 2014) showing the brain was "astonishingly well preserved," stating "it seems that you can preserve everything". Separately, research examining M22 vitrification found "very encouraging results" in preserving brain ultrastructure even under non-ideal conditions, narrowing the gap between current preservation and theoretical scanning for emulation.
A groundbreaking new connectome maps every neural connection in an adult fruit fly's central nervous system, creating an unprecedented view of how the brain and body work together. The team discovered that many fruit fly behaviors appear to be directed by local neural circuits in the relevant body parts, rather than by one central command area in the brain, which informs bottom-up emulation strategies for validation.
Research examines the integration of large language models into multi-agent simulations by replacing hard-coded agent programs with LLM-driven prompts, showcased in ant colony foraging and bird flocking. Studies observe that the performance of multi-agent systems scales with the number of "agents" and enable ensembles to outperform larger models than their own base model, suggesting scaling laws for distributed emulated cognition when multiple brain regions or agents coordinate.