Swiss scientists and IBM have announced plans to create a detailed digital model of a neocortical column, a tiny but crucial area of the human brain.

Professor Henry Markram, founder and head of Switzerland's Ecole Polytechnique F‚d‚rale de Lausanne's (EPFL) Brain Mind Institute, says the simulation will 'phenomenally' accelerate the pace of neuroscience research.

'Some experiments, just to study one pathway, may take us three years to complete. With this model, we could do them in a day or even a couple of hours,' he said.

Under the Blue Brain project, IBM is building a custom version of its Blue Gene supercomputer with 8,000 processors, each of which will simulate the behaviour of one to two neurons.

The system will have a peak processing speed of 22.8 teraflops, making it one of the world's 10 most powerful systems.

'This whole machine will be converted into one tiny little column, simulating about 10,000 neurons,' said Markram.

By comparison, the human neocortical column, which measures about half a millimetre wide and two millimetres long, contains between 50,000 and 70,000 neurons, with five to 10 kilometres of 'cables' connecting them.

The entire human brain contains about a million of these columns.

Markram says the accumulation of a vast amount of data about the brain, combined with the power of today's supercomputers, makes such a simulation possible.

'It's just two things that have converged. It's the massive amount of data that has been built up over the past 100 years, which has been perfected and quantified in the past 10 years - and then the power of supercomputing,' he said.

Markram has been conducting detailed research and experimentation over the past decade to generate the necessary quantitative data required on the micro-architecture of the neocortex for such a model to be plausible.

The neocortical column marks the evolutionary step from reptiles to mammals - the quantum leap that started the new form of mammalian intelligence that eventually culminated in human intelligence and cognitive function.

'This is really the magic in evolution that occurred,' said Markram. Subsequent phases of the project will expand the simulation to include circuitry from other brain regions and finally the whole brain.

Markram says the project will eventually provide a better understanding of how and why certain microcircuits in the brain malfunction. These malfunctions are thought to cause psychiatric disorders such as autism, schizophrenia and depression.