Researchers working on the Blue Brain project said they have successfully simulated a portion of a rat’s brain. The project is part of the larger Human Brain Project, which has a major goal to build the ultimate goal of building a functional computer model of the human brain.

A team of researchers in an experiment successfully fragmented a rat’s brain and then reconstructed it using the Blue Brain Project supercomputer. They did so to determine how neurons behave even when they are in an external environment.

As reported by The Guardian, at least 30,000 neurons were recreated digitally producing 40 million synapses. Researchers during the study found that the digital behavior of the neurons matched with the activities exhibited by rats in real.

Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project, said in a statement that this is the very first draft reconstruction of a piece of neocortex. This beautiful reconstruction is like a fundamental building block of the brain, he said.

According to the scientists, they categorized the rat neurons into more than 200 types and arranged it in manner that it appears to be similar with that of a real rat. Doing this helped scientists successfully simulate the rat’s brain.

Markram said their present experiment didn’t involved blood vessels or cells, but the study serves as a major step in understanding how the human brain actually works.

The Blue Brain Project through animal experiments aims to reverse engineer human brains, so that they could digitally reconstruct the brain in a computer.

But Markram said that the task is full of difficulties. The 30,000 neurons used in the recent experiment is just a third of a cubic millimeter of the rat's neocortex, he said.

And in order to reconstruct a human brain, about 100 billion neurons have to be connected through 1,000 trillion synapses.