'Brain' In A Dish Acts As Autopilot, Living Computer

[Knight-Dragon]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/10/041022104658.htm

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- A University of Florida scientist has grown a living "brain" that can fly a simulated plane, giving scientists a novel way to observe how brain cells function as a network.

The "brain" -- a collection of 25,000 living neurons, or nerve cells, taken from a rat's brain and cultured inside a glass dish -- gives scientists a unique real-time window into the brain at the cellular level. By watching the brain cells interact, scientists hope to understand what causes neural disorders such as epilepsy and to determine noninvasive ways to intervene. As living computers, they may someday be used to fly small unmanned airplanes or handle tasks that are dangerous for humans, such as search-and-rescue missions or bomb damage assessments.

"We're interested in studying how brains compute," said Thomas DeMarse, the UF professor of biomedical engineering who designed the study. "If you think about your brain, and learning and the memory process, I can ask you questions about when you were 5 years old and you can retrieve information. That's a tremendous capacity for memory. In fact, you perform fairly simple tasks that you would think a computer would easily be able to accomplish, but in fact it can't."

While computers are very fast at processing some kinds of information, they can't approach the flexibility of the human brain, DeMarse said. In particular, brains can easily make certain kinds of computations – such as recognizing an unfamiliar piece of furniture as a table or a lamp – that are very difficult to program into today's computers.

"If we can extract the rules of how these neural networks are doing computations like pattern recognition, we can apply that to create novel computing systems," he said.

DeMarse experimental "brain" interacts with an F-22 fighter jet flight simulator through a specially designed plate called a multi-electrode array and a common desktop computer.

"It's essentially a dish with 60 electrodes arranged in a grid at the bottom," DeMarse said. "Over that we put the living cortical neurons from rats, which rapidly begin to reconnect themselves, forming a living neural network – a brain."

The brain and the simulator establish a two-way connection, similar to how neurons receive and interpret signals from each other to control our bodies. By observing how the nerve cells interact with the simulator, scientists can decode how a neural network establishes connections and begins to compute, DeMarse said.

When DeMarse first puts the neurons in the dish, they look like little more than grains of sand sprinkled in water. However, individual neurons soon begin to extend microscopic lines toward each other, making connections that represent neural processes. "You see one extend a process, pull it back, extend it out – and it may do that a couple of times, just sampling who's next to it, until over time the connectivity starts to establish itself," he said. "(The brain is) getting its network to the point where it's a live computation device."

To control the simulated aircraft, the neurons first receive information from the computer about flight conditions: whether the plane is flying straight and level or is tilted to the left or to the right. The neurons then analyze the data and respond by sending signals to the plane's controls. Those signals alter the flight path and new information is sent to the neurons, creating a feedback system.

"Initially when we hook up this brain to a flight simulator, it doesn't know how to control the aircraft," DeMarse said. "So you hook it up and the aircraft simply drifts randomly. And as the data comes in, it slowly modifies the (neural) network so over time, the network gradually learns to fly the aircraft."

Although the brain currently is able to control the pitch and roll of the simulated aircraft in weather conditions ranging from blue skies to stormy, hurricane-force winds, the underlying goal is a more fundamental understanding of how neurons interact as a network, DeMarse said.

"There's a lot of data out there that will tell you that the computation that's going on here isn't based on just one neuron. The computational property is actually an emergent property of hundreds or thousands of neurons cooperating to produce the amazing processing power of the brain."

With Jose Principe, a UF distinguished professor of electrical engineering and director of UF's Computational NeuroEngineering Laboratory, DeMarse has a $500,000 National Science Foundation grant to create a mathematical model that reproduces how the neurons compute.

These living neural networks are being used to pursue a variety of engineering and neurobiology research goals, said Steven Potter, an assistant professor in the Georgia Tech/Emory Department of Biomedical Engineering who uses cultured brain cells to study learning and memory. DeMarse was a postdoctoral researcher in Potter's laboratory at Georgia Tech before he arrived at UF.

"A lot of people have been interested in what changes in the brains of animals and people when they are learning things," Potter said. "We're interested in getting down into the network and cellular mechanisms, which is hard to do in living animals. And the engineering goal would be to get ideas from this system about how brains compute and process information."

Though the "brain" can successfully control a flight simulation program, more elaborate applications are a long way off, DeMarse said. "We're just starting out. But using this model will help us understand the crucial bit of information between inputs and the stuff that comes out," he said. "And you can imagine the more you learn about that, the more you can harness the computation of these neurons into a wide range of applications."

 

[Birdjaguar]

Are we amazing or what!! I am overawed by the ingenuity of our species and our unending cleverness.

 

[amadeus]

How do we know the rats won't turn on us?

 

[Birdjaguar]

How do we know the rats won't turn on us?

Oh no
Another war we won't know how to win.

 

[Chairman Meow]

This is your captain, Rat Brain 4023, integrated neural network and my first officer, Rat Brain 4024. We'll be flying at an altitude of 30,000 feet and are expecting a nice smooth ride-- HOLY CRAP CHEESE!!! LOOK OVER THERE IT'S CHEESE!!! Ooop, sorry about that, false alarm. We're expecting nice weather in HEY THERE'S A CAT IN THE CARGO HOLD!!! Eject! Eject! Eject!

 

[The Person]

This is something I only hear about at CFC.

 

[CurtSibling]

How do we know the rats won't turn on us?

They have good reason to!



@ChairmanMeow:

 

[Chieftess]

Not really surprising at all. The nerves that go through your body is essentially an extension of the brain, adapting to how it interacts with the world. For example, my typing is the brain sending signals to my fingers on what keys to type (without looking, since it's done it over and over). The letters on the screen are read by my eyes and then converted into electric-pulses that get sent to the brain, analyzing if I've made a typo, or typed in the letter I wanted. It's another system of input/output. Imagine hooking up all computers connected on the Internet at one super computer. Now imagine that one super computer with hundreds of millions of people "connected" to it. Part, or most of their brain (that's not controlling bodily functions) could be used for say, researching medicine, science, etc. It might be completely subconscious. (for example, it could be 8 years from now and you could be debating the 2012 elections in OT, while your brain is calculating stuff. Kind of like SETI, and a few other research computer programs).

 

[Pirate]

I don't get how they "teach" these cells to fly a plane. So the cells recieve feedback about the position of the plane, but how do they know what to do with it? If you are teaching a computer you can enter criteria by which it judges the feedback. What is the equivalent method in cells? How do the cells not just fire randomly?

 

[Masquerouge]

I don't get how they "teach" these cells to fly a plane. So the cells recieve feedback about the position of the plane, but how do they know what to do with it? If you are teaching a computer you can enter criteria by which it judges the feedback. What is the equivalent method in cells? How do the cells not just fire randomly?

Yeah, I don't get it too. Like, how can the neuronal pattern know a plane is supposed to fly in the air ? And know what a plane, to fly and the air are ?How can it know a crash is a no-no ?
Humans (and animals) learn mostly by gratification/punishment. How do you punish a cake of neurons ? Pure shock treatment ? Even worse, because I can't bring myself to picture it, how do you REWARD a cake of neurons ?

 

[Paradigne]

Rat brains are only for testing... Lets get something big, like Elephant brains! Think of all the computing power!!

 

[~Corsair#01~]

You know, I saw this, that thread about the guinea pigs AND the the news about the satanist sailor yesterday. Honestly, you civ-fanatics have to try a little harder.

 

[bobgote]

I don't get how they "teach" these cells to fly a plane. So the cells recieve feedback about the position of the plane, but how do they know what to do with it? If you are teaching a computer you can enter criteria by which it judges the feedback. What is the equivalent method in cells? How do the cells not just fire randomly?

and @ Masquerouge too:

it depends. a lot of it is to do with seeing what difference a change in input will make to the feedback (not that it's consciously doing this). certain neurons will receive only a certain value/frequency or whatever of feedback and the neurons will make connections with similarly aligned neurons. at least that's how the theory goes. you don't actually need the ability to evaluate the validity of the feedback, just to be able to cluster similar results together, which these cells appear to do. that's pretty much how the brain acts at the neuron level.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Is this the basis for a new AI for games? They are probably use Microsoft's Flight Simulator.

 

[stormbind]

You know, I saw this, that thread about the guinea pigs AND the the news about the satanist sailor yesterday. Honestly, you civ-fanatics have to try a little harder.

Why didn't you post them then? Could it be the same reason nobody else did?

 

[amadeus]

We've got a mouse in our house. They're starting already.

I've got the [wild] cat situated in front of the room where we think it is...

 

[amadeus]

We got it. It's dead. That's what you get for being a tresspasser.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Five minutes, that was a quick kill.

 

[amadeus]

I only posted about it 10 mintues ago. I had been waiting for it for about an hour before we set up the trap.

 

[Yuri2356]

Horray for science!
By the time CivVII comes out we'll be plugging ourselves into a virtual reality Matrix!