The Balance and Elegance of Brain: Meet the man who wants to use supercomputers to build a virtual brain. And it will cost euros 1 billion...: Trying to map the brain - with its billions of neurons and trillions of connections - is a mammoth task. Henry Markram tells how his son's autism fired his ambition to unlock the secrets of consciousness by using 'big data' to trace the electronic signals that create our thoughts. By Mark Honigsbaum: MODERN SCIENCE LANDMARKS: Can you build a virtual brain with supercomputers?