10 Years and Billions Spent, But the "Human Brain Project" Failed to Confirm Brain Dogmas

There have in recent decades been two gigantic brain research projects: (1) the BRAIN Initiative funded by the United States, and (2) the Human Brain Project funded by the European Union. The BRAIN Initiative has been funded for 13 years and has received several billions of dollars in funding. The grand ambition of the BRAIN Initiative and its failure to succeed in such an ambition is discussed in my post here. 

The Human Brain Project lasted from 2013 to 2023. In a previous post in late 2023 I discussed the failure of the project to produce any evidence backing up the main claims of neuroscientists about brains making minds and brains storing memories. But in July 2024 there was released a 61-page "10 Years Assessment" document summarizing the results of the Human Brain Project, a document I have not yet discussed. Let us look at that document, which you can read here. 

The document has this official-looking front page:

The assessment starts out with groundless boasting, making untrue statements about a "paradigm shift" that never occurred. 

"Between 2013-2023, the HBP [Human Brain Project] flagship brought together more than 500 scientists, engineers and clinicians from all over Europe. They shared a vision of unravelling the mysteries of the human brain through advanced computational methods and cutting-edge technologies. This interdisciplinary collaboration resulted in a paradigm shift in brain research and in groundbreaking developments in neuroscience, computer science, robotics and data management."

We have several pages talking about models and technologies and data sets and so forth, without anything very exciting-sounding being mentioned. Section 4.2 of the document then contradicts itself. On the left side it confesses, "However, the ultimate goal of elucidating human behaviour and cognition through neuroscience was not sufficiently supported within the project particularly in the early stages, although the influence of this work grew towards the latter stages of the HBP [Human Brain Project]."  That sounds like something someone would say if a project had failed to explain cognition through neuroscience. But the right side of the same page has a bullet list mentioning "significant advances in our understanding of human cognition and its brain bases, realized in a large number of publications in leading international journals." We get no specifics backing up this claim, which is not correct. No such advances occurred. 

In the same section 4.6 we read of claims that sound like excuses for why the Human Brain Project failed to show a brain basis for cognition. The statements include these:

• "Activities focused on cognition were not well integrated into the HBP despite their emphasis within the project."
• "An early decision was made to restructure the work subsumed under ‘Cognitive Architectures’ meaning it was subsequently scaled back and the relative allocation of resources (budget/personnel) was reduced."
• "Moreover, the scientific investigations relating to cognition and the brain proceeded mainly independently, often without capitalizing on significant advances on connectomics and neurodevelopmental research findings from outside of the HBP."

This sounds like making excuses for a failure to show a brain basis for cognition. 

The report goes on and on, talking about technologies and AI and models and data sets and brain atlases and "neuromorphic computing" (a misnomer which is really just computing not bearing any close resemblance to what goes on is brains). What we fail to get is any description of something that was learned by the Human Brain Project that helps clarify how humans learn or recall or think or imagine or form beliefs. 

A review of all of the references that the text of the 61-page document makes to either "learning" or "memory" fails to find a discussion of any progress in learning about how human learning or human recall occurs. The document does not use the words "recall," "recollection" or "remember." The document also fails to use the word "engram," the word neuroscientists use when they are speculating about a storage place of memories in the brain. 

The main theory of neuroscientists about a brain storage of memories is the theory that memories are stored in synapses. The Human Brain Project 10-year assessment document only uses the word "synapses" twice. The first reference is this: "Within each module, the emulation of 512 neurons and 115,000 synapses takes place, achieving computational speeds 104 times faster than biological time."  That's a mere reference to something going on in a computer. The second reference is to a company called Synapse Biomedical Inc. The document uses the word "synaptic" nine times, never in an impressive way. 

The most impressive-sounding of these uses of the word "synaptic" is  this line: "HBP [Human Brain Project] researchers investigated the impact of attention, synaptic tags, feedback connections, and neuromodulators on learning."  We then read of three papers that were published as a result of these publications. They are these:

• "Natural gradient learning for spiking neurons," co-authored by Kreutzer.  This very short paper discusses no observations about brains or synapses. 
• "NMDA-driven dendritic modulation enables multitask representation learning in hierarchical sensory processing pathways" co-authored by Wybo. The paper is a good example of how fiddling around with software is being passed off as "neuroscience research." The paper deals almost entirely with some computer software system, making only passing references to brain chemistry. Parts of that software system are being misleadingly named after parts of the brain. So when the authors state "learning at the dendritic synapses was orchestrated by an online error-weighted Hebbian plasticity rule during a continuous stream of inputs (Fig. 6B)," they are not referring to dendritic synapses in any brain, but are most misleadingly referring to parts of a computer software system that have been incorrectly called "dendritic synapses." And in many other places when the authors refer to "neurons" they are referring not to neurons in a brain, but to parts of their computer software system that have been misleadingly called "neurons." And when their Figure 6 begins with the phrase "dendritic branches learn," this is a reference not to actual dendritic branches in a brain, but to parts of a computer software system that have been misleadingly called "dendritic branches." 
• "Deep Gated Hebbian Predictive Coding Accounts for Emergence of Complex Neural Response Properties Along the Visual Cortical Hierarchy" a paper co-authored by Dora. The authors say, "We developed a scalable, deep network architecture for predictive coding that is trained using a gated Hebbian learning rule and mimics the feedforward and feedback connectivity of the cortex." This is more misleading work in which people are fooling around with computer software systems, and incorrectly claiming that such activity tells us something about the brain. We have the same kind of extremely misleading language as in the previous paper mentioned. So, for example, when the authors in Figure 1 refer to "neurons," they are not referring to neurons in a brain, but are instead referring to parts of their computer software system that have been misleadingly called "neurons."  And when they refer to "neuronal activities...of all neurons," they are referring not to activity of neurons in the brain, but to mere activity in their computer software system. 

These were the kind of "brain learning" papers that got funded by the Human Brain Project.  Very high in misleading content, such papers did nothing to help explain how a brain could learn or recall. Like the BRAIN Initiative that spent billions but failed to do anything to help justify "brains make minds" and "brain store memories" dogmas, the Human Brain Project spent billions while failing to do anything to substantiate such beliefs, which are not well-established facts, but merely socially constructed tenets of a conformist belief community.