Blue Brain Project

The goal of EPFL’s Blue Brain Project is to build biologically detailed digital reconstructions and simulations of the mouse brain.

EPFL’s Blue Brain Project is a Swiss brain research Initiative led by Founder and Director Professor Henry Markram.

The aim of Blue Brain is to establish simulation neuroscience as a complementary approach alongside experimental, theoretical and clinical neuroscience to understanding the brain, by building the world’s first biologically detailed digital reconstructions and simulations of the mouse brain.

The supercomputer-based reconstructions and simulations built by the project offer a radically new approach for understanding the multilevel structure and function of the brain.

The project’s novel research strategy exploits interdependencies in the experimental data to obtain dense maps of the brain, without measuring every detail of its multiple levels of organization (molecules, cells, micro-circuits, brain regions, the whole brain).

This strategy allows the project to build digital reconstructions (computer models) of the brain at an unprecedented level of biological detail.

Supercomputer-based simulation of their behavior turns understanding the brain into a tractable problem, providing a new tool to study the complex interactions within different levels of brain organization and to investigate the cross-level links leading from genes to cognition.

The Blue Brain Portal is a knowledge space for neuroscientists. EPFL’s Blue Brain Project recognizes that knowledge sharing is an important driving force to consolidate and promote simulation neuroscience, which in turn, is fundamental to understanding the brain as a complex multi-scale system. Therefore, the Blue Brain Portal brings together in one place open-sourced software, tools, models and data, both from us and our collaborators. The aim is for this knowledge to be utilized by both the neuroscientific and the wider scientific community to develop the field of simulation neuroscience.

Join Blue Brain’s journey to digitally reconstruct and simulate the brain.