For over 20 years, bright minds and ambitious projects have attempted to emulate the human brain across various scales of organization. Despite impressive efforts to bring in the latest and greatest computing power of massively parallel hardware, success hasn’t yielded practical applications yet.

To get practicality sooner, The Virtual Brain takes a network approach on the largest scale: By manipulating network parameters, in particular the brain’s connectivity, The Virtual Brain simulates its behavior as it is commonly observed in clinical scanners (e.g. EEG, MEG, fMRI).

Though The Virtual Brain incorporates the complex world of neuro-chemistry only to a small degree, it gains a lot by not becoming as complex as the brain itself.

Instead, The Virtual Brain embraces and extends novel concepts from computational, cognitive and clinical neuroscience in order to drastically reduce the model's complexity while still keeping it sufficiently realistic – and delivering the same output as clinical brain-scanners.