Press & Media
Resources for journalists, researchers, and anyone covering the State of Brain Emulation Report 2025.
Resources for journalists, researchers, and anyone covering the State of Brain Emulation Report 2025.
The State of Brain Emulation Report 2025 is a comprehensive assessment of over 20 years of progress toward digitally replicating brains in physical detail. Coordinated by MxSchons GmbH and authored by Niccolo Zanichelli, Maximilian Schons, Isaak Freeman, Philip K. Shiu, and Anton Arkhipov, the report draws on expert interviews, hundreds of references, and original datasets to map the current state of the field and identify its bottlenecks. All materials are available under CC BY 4.0.
The main barrier to better brain emulation models is more and higher-quality experimental data. No organism’s full brain has been recorded at single-neuron resolution.
For organisms under 1 million neurons — fruit flies, small fish, bees — capturing all aspects of the brain faithfully is increasingly plausible, potentially within the decade, at a cost in the low $100Ms.
A mouse brain has 500x more neurons than a fruit fly; a human brain has about a million times more. Mapping a mouse brain at the needed resolution is comparable in scale to a high-resolution reconstruction of Earth.
Everyone worldwide focused specifically on brain emulation could fit in a single workshop room. Total global funding for basic neuroscience has been roughly $0.5B/year — about 1% of the NIH’s annual budget.
Any individual or funder entering this field can have outsized impact given its small size and early stage.
Quick reference numbers from the report
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