A recent simulation in Japan shows both how far modern computer processing has come, and just how good the supercomputer in our skulls really is.

These two points were proven by a team of Japanese and German researchers, who have modelled just one second’s worth of activity in the entire human brain.

The mapping of a single second within the brain takes one of the world’s largest supercomputers over 40 minutes. The researchers claim it is the most accurate simulation of the complex neuronal network ever produced.

The model was made possible by the ‘K computer’, a device boasting 705,024 processor cores and 1.4 million GB of RAM.

All of these resources were tapped to produce simulated activity in a replica network of 1.73 billion nerve cells and 10.4 trillion synapses.

“If petascale computers like the K computer are capable of representing one per cent of the network of a human brain today, then we know that simulating the whole brain at the level of the individual nerve cell and its synapses will be possible with exascale computers - hopefully available within the next decade,” said researcher Markus Diesmann.

Exascale computing refers to devices which could perform a quintillion floating point operations per second, the range required to match the human brain’s processing power.