The Blue Brain Project and Blue Mind

The work I call "Blue Mind" refers to our collaborative efforts to better understand our "brain on water" in all of its forms and applications. We do this by convening an annual summit that brings together psychologists, neuroscientists, athletes, artists, explorers, and conservationists. We connect dots, generate hypotheses, stoke new conversations, and provoke reseach into a broad set of questions related to how humans interact with water. The results have been fascinating and enjoyable, with applications to a wide range of human society. I am a marine biologist and social entrepreur at times, not a neuroscientist or psychologist. I love learning as much as I can from my colleagues who spend their lives studying the brain and behavior. Then I like to try to apply what I learn to the challenging work of protecting and restoring life in our oceans and waterways.

You can read much more about Blue Mind by poking around this website and following the links to others.

That said, there's another ambitious and fascinating project that's been around for a similar number of years that is often referred to as The Blue Brain Project. While there's likely to be some interesting overlap, Blue Brain is very different. More than once there's been some Blue Mind / Brain confusion, so hopefully this might help.

Wikipedia describes the project:

"The Blue Brain Project is an attempt to create a synthetic brain by reverse-engineering the mammalian brain down to the molecular level. The aim of the project, founded in May 2005 by the Brain and Mind Institute of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, is to study the brain's architectural and functional principles.

The project is headed by the founding director Henry Markram and co-directed by Felix Schürmann and Sean Hill. Using a Blue Gene supercomputer running Michael Hines's NEURON software, the simulation does not consist simply of an artificial neural network, but involves a biologically realistic model of neurons.^[1][2][3] It is hoped that it will eventually shed light on the nature of consciousness.^[3]

There are a number of sub-projects, including the Cajal Blue Brain, coordinated by the Supercomputing and Visualization Center of Madrid (CeSViMa), and others run by universities and independent laboratories."

There are plenty of skeptics and critics of the Blue Brain Project, as there are of Blue Mind. That just makes the work sharper and better.

The collective conversations about how the human brain works, and nichey subconversation about how it relates to water, have really just begin. Tip of the iceberg, as they say. I'm glad to be in on some of the dialog. I love my brain--my mind too--and water. I hope you do too.