This is a fully digital mouse cortex. “Therefore, it is much more than just an animation.”It’s also far less vague than the term “virtual brain,” Arkhipov adds. Under many leading theories of consciousness, such architectures would remain completely unconscious, even if they reproduced neural activity to perfection. In essence, an artificial cortex could look like a mouse brain, walk like a mouse brain—and still tell us nothing about the mouse’s inner world. Two examples he gives are plasticity, which is how neurons change with experience, and neuromodulation, the chemical tuning system that shapes brain activity.