How powerful is a mind? Supercomputer takes 40 minutes to map 1 second of brain activity

Sign up to our free weekly IndyTech newsletter delivered straight to your inbox Sign up to our free IndyTech newsletter Sign up to our free IndyTech newsletter SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy A powerful supercomputer in Japan has broken the code of the human brain, accurately mapping one second of one percent of human brain activity. The most sophisticated of its kind, the project, a joint venture between Japanese research group RIKEN and German research group Forschungszentrum Jülich, was designed to gauge the limits of brain simulation technology. An exascale computer is one that can perform a quintillion floating point operations per second, thought to be same power as a human brain. “If petascale computers like the K computer are capable of representing one per cent of the network of a human brain today, then we know that simulating the whole brain at the level of the individual nerve cell and its synapses will be possible with exascale computers - hopefully available within the next decade,” Markus Diesmann, one of the scientists involved, told the Daily Telegraph.