In 2006, the project made its first model of a
neocortical column with simplified neurons. In November 2007, it completed an initial model of the rat neo
cortical column. This marked the end of the first phase, delivering a data-driven process for creating, validating, and researching the neocortical column. Neocortical columns are considered by some researchers to be the smallest functional units of the
neocortex, and they are thought to be responsible for higher functions such as
conscious thought. In humans, each column is about in length, has a diameter of and contains about 60,000 neurons.
Rat neocortical columns are very similar in structure but contain only 10,000 neurons and 108
synapses. In 2009, Henry Markram claimed that a "detailed, functional artificial human brain can be built within the next 10 years". He conceived the
Human Brain Project, to which the Blue Brain Project contributed, In 2015, the project simulated part of a rat brain with 30,000 neurons. Also in 2015, scientists at
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) developed a quantitative model of the previously unknown relationship between the neurons and the
astrocytes. This model describes the energy management of the brain through the function of the neuro-glial vascular unit (NGV). The additional layer of neuron and
glial cells is being added to Blue Brain Project models to improve functionality of the system. In 2017, Blue Brain Project discovered that
neural cliques connected to one another in up to eleven dimensions. The project's director suggested that the difficulty of understanding the brain is partly because the mathematics usually applied for studying
neural networks cannot detect that many dimensions. The Blue Brain Project was able to model these networks using
algebraic topology. In 2018, Blue Brain Project released its first digital 3D brain cell atlas which, according to
ScienceDaily, is like "going from hand-drawn maps to Google Earth", providing information about major cell types, numbers, and positions in 737 regions of the brain. In 2019, Idan Segev, one of the
computational neuroscientists working on the Blue Brain Project, gave a talk titled: "Brain in the computer: what did I learn from simulating the brain." In his talk, he mentioned that the whole cortex for the mouse brain was complete and virtual
EEG experiments would begin soon. He also mentioned that the model had become too heavy on the supercomputers they were using at the time, and that they were consequently exploring methods in which every neuron could be represented as an
artificial neural network. In 2022, scientists at the Blue Brain Project used algebraic topology to create an algorithm, Topological Neuronal Synthesis, that generates a large number of unique cells using only a few examples, synthesizing millions of unique neuronal morphologies. This allows them to replicate both healthy and diseased states of the brain. In a paper Kenari et al. were able to digitally synthesize dendritic morphologies from the mouse brain using this algorithm. They mapped entire brain regions from just a few reference cells. Since it is open source, this will enable the modelling of brain diseases and eventually, the algorithm could lead to digital twins of brains. ==Software==