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Neuroscience is a reductionist science. It describes the brain in terms of its physical details, dissecting the mind into the smallest possible parts. This process has been phenomenally successful. Over the last 50 years, scientists have managed to uncover a seemingly endless list of molecules, enzymes, pathways, and genes. The mind has been revealed as a Byzantine machine. According to Markram, however, this scientific approach has exhausted itself. "I think that reductionism peaked five years ago," he says. "This doesn't mean we've completed the reductionist project, far from it. There is still so much that we don't know about the brain. But now we have a different, and perhaps even harder, problem. We're literally drowning in data. We have lots of scientists who spend their life working out important details, but we have virtually no idea how all these details connect together. Blue Brain is about showing people the whole."

good reason to cite physics—neuroscience has almost no history of modeling. It's a thoroughly empirical discipline, rooted in the manual labor of molecular biology.

computational neuroscience. "It's not interested enough in the biology," he says. "What they typically do is begin with a brain function they want to model"—like object detection or sentence recognition—"and then try to see if they can get a computer to replicate that function. The problem is that if you ask a hundred computational neuroscientists to build a functional model, you'll get a hundred different answers. These models might help us think about the brain, but they don't really help us understand it. If you want your model to represent reality, then you've got to model it on reality."