This story is too incredible to simply cut a snippet so I'm posting the whole thing:
quote:
A Florida scientist has developed a "brain" in a glass dish that is capable of flying a virtual fighter plane and could enhance medical understanding of neural disorders such as epilepsy.
The "living computer" was grown from 25,000 neurons extracted from a rat's brain and arranged over a grid of 60 electrodes in a Petri dish.
The brain cells then started to reconnect themselves, forming microscopic interconnections, said Thomas DeMarse, professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Florida.
"It's essentially a dish with 60 electrodes arranged in a dish at the bottom," explained DeMarse, who designed the study.
"Over that we put the living cortical neurons from rats, which rapidly begin to reconnect themselves, forming a living neural network -- a brain."
Although such living networks could one day be used to fly unmanned aircraft, DeMarse said the study was of more immediate relevance as an experimental aid to understanding how the human brain performs and learns computational tasks at a cellular level.
"We're interested in studying how brains compute," said DeMarse.
"If you think about your brain, and learning and the memory process, I can ask you questions about when you were five-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."
Although computers can perform certain tasks extremely quickly, they lack the flexibility and adaptability of the human brain and perform particularly poorly at pattern recognition tasks.
"If we extract the rules of how these neural networks are doing computations like pattern recognition we can apply that to create novel computing systems," said DeMarse.
"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 of thousands of neurons cooperating to produce the amazing processing power of the brain."
As well as enhancing scientific knowledge of how the brain works, the neurons may provide clues to brain dysfunction. For example, an epileptic seizure is triggered when all the neurons in the brain fire simultaneously -- a pattern commonly replicated by a neural network in a dish.
When linked up to an F-22 jet flight simulator, the brain and the simulator established a two-way connection similar to how neurons receive and interpret signals from each other to control our bodies.
Gradually the brain learnt to control the flight of the plane based on the information it received about flight conditions.
However, the brain still falls a long way short of the complexity of the human brain, which has billions of neurons, and Steven Potter, a biomedical engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said a brain in a dish flying a real plane was still a long way off.
"A lot of people have been interested in what changes in the brains of animals and people when they are learning things," said Potter, DeMarse's former supervisor.
"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."
for some odd reason, while the word "Ganya" was still just a thought-dropping in my head, I thought it'd only be four letters. But apparently it's five. yep.
Does a real rat have a soul? I dunno, it's alive, it has something like a soul, a self awareness.
If they put human brains cells in dishes in the far future, that would be whacky.
That's what Dr. Daestrom did on the original Star Trek. Put in engrams or something like that on the M-5's circuits, allowing him to think. M-5 went crazy and wiped out some star ships during some war games gone bad.
But that's just hollywood trying to teach us a lesson.
It's very strange that we lived to actually see something like that in action in real life.
True, it's a rat brain, or some cells from a rat brain, and a flight simulator, but who would have thought it possible?
It creeps me out a little.
Not because I think it will go crazy or nothing, just because it's a blending of life and computer, and it's got some ethical questions.
On 60 minutes a few years back, they showed some pigs that have human hearts and lungs growing in them. They did some DNA splicing or whatever and are growing human lungs in pigs for transplant.
The only problem, the pigs get to big, and the lungs, so they are still working on it, to perfect it.
If they can do lungs, they can do brains.
You just know that some secret government lab has already grown a human brain in a pig just to see if they can do it.
I know that makes me sound paranoid, like I'm mister government conspiracy guy, but I think they have done it.
Cloning seems to be the big ethical debate in the world now. The United Nations tried to pass some law to ban it, but couldn't get the votes, so it made some non-binding resolution or something this week to say it's wrong.
I myself, don't see anything wrong with cloning. I feel uncomfortable with the embryos getting thrown away if there are extra, but aside from that point, if they could clone someone and not harm extra embryos along the way, I don't see anything wrong with it.
Most of the world is against me on that one.
But growing a human brain in a pig, or using human brain cells in a computer, I find that creepy and unethical.
Well, so far it's just a rat. Hard to feel bad for a rat. Hopefully, society will see the harm in using human neurons.
Hey, I'm long winded tonight, I set out to write one short paragraph and went to preachin.
whidden said this in post #7 :
True, it's a rat brain, or some cells from a rat brain, and a flight simulator, but who would have thought it possible?
It creeps me out a little.
Not because I think it will go crazy or nothing, just because it's a blending of life and computer, and it's got some ethical questions.
On 60 minutes a few years back, they showed some pigs that have human hearts and lungs growing in them. They did some DNA splicing or whatever and are growing human lungs in pigs for transplant.
The only problem, the pigs get to big, and the lungs, so they are still working on it, to perfect it.
If they can do lungs, they can do brains.
You just know that some secret government lab has already grown a human brain in a pig just to see if they can do it.
But growing a human brain in a pig, or using human brain cells in a computer, I find that creepy and unethical.
Pigs are the only animals that closely resemble human skin, tissue and organs. They are used to study the decomposition process when human cadavers aren't readily available.
I would assume that by growing a human lung and brain in a pig, scientists are working on ways to cure or prevent human disease. It could be very useful in the future.
There is something very creepy about people who develop artificial intelligence. I normally wouldn't give it a second thought, but since I had a conversation with a guy the other day who builds robots, I am very concerned for his mental health. He is working on a plan to build highly functioning robots for the sole purpose of being God to an intelligent life form, albeit artificial.
Well, yeah, I'm sure you could get some medical benefit from growing a human brain in a pig, but wouldn't it be rude for the poor sap who grows up as a pig?
It would be a human being trapped in a pigs body.
Man, this sounds like some whacked out science fiction story, it's hard to believe it really happening. (Well, the lung part at least.)
11-05-2004 12:44 AM
