Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project, said that his team is intending to build a functioning, artificial human brain within the next 10 years. The team started few years ago with the efforts to create a fully functioning artificial rat brain using the IBM supercomputer, Blue Gene. The idea was if they could fruitfully replicate a rat's brain, they would then influence their knowledge to do the same with a human one. With not much success in the beginning, recently the neurons have begun unexpectedly organizing themselves into a more complex pattern. Markram thinks that in 10 years, they'll moreover have an artificial human brain that has consciousness or they'll know that consciousness is more than just a neurological pattern. According to the scientists, this is the beginning of the self-organizing neurological patterns that eventually, in more complex mammal brains, become personality.

[Cnet]