Редактирование: Whole brain emulation (раздел)

=== Neuroglia ===

* Glia cells have traditionally been regarded as merely supporting actors to the neurons, but 
recent results suggest that they may play a fairly active role in neural activity. Beside the 
important role of myelinization for increasing neural transmission speed, at the very least 
they have strong effects on the local chemical environment of the extracellular space 
surrounding neurons and synapses. 
 
* Glial cells exhibit calcium waves that spread along glial networks and affect nearby neurons 
(Newman and Zahs, 1998). They can both excite and inhibit nearby neurons through 
neurotransmitters (Kozlov, Angulo et al., 2006). Conversely, the calcium concentration of glial 
cells is affected by the presence of specific neuromodulators (Perea and Araque, 2005). This 
suggests that the glial cells acts as an information processing network integrated with the 
neurons (Fellin and Carmignoto, 2004). One role could be in regulating local energy and 
oxygen supply. 
 
* If glial processing turns out to be significant and fine‐grained, brain emulation would have to 
emulate the glia cells in the same way as neurons, increasing the storage demands by at least 
one order of magnitude. However, the time constants for glial calcium dynamics is generally 
far slower than the dynamics of action potentials (on the order of seconds or more), 
suggesting that the time resolution would not have to be as fine, making the computational 
demands increase far less steeply.