The goal of the 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 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. The supercomputer-based simulations and reconstructions built by Blue Brain offer a radically new approach for understanding the multi-level structure and function of the brain.