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Nerve Cells Successfully Grown on Silicon
crabpeople writes "Researchers at the University of Calgary have found that nerve cells grown on a microchip can learn and memorize information which can be communicated to the brain. 'We discovered that when we used the chip to stimulate the neurons, their synaptic strength was enhanced,' said Naweed Syed, a neurobiologist at the University of Calgary's faculty of medicine."
Not making faster Pentiums or Athlons. Sorry. Most of that magic has already been woven. Who out there is qualified to make systems level designs and decisions about bio computer systems? Think about the type of knowledge it must take about physics, electrical and computer engineering, as well as biological knowledge.
What type of magnetic and power restrictions will there be? Reliability? What type of optimizations will exist? Interfaces? Flexibility?
We're still quite far away from having things like this be applicable to modern day but think about when you too can say, "I know Kung Fu"!
Researchers at the University of Calgary have found that nerve cells grown on a microchip can learn and memorize information which can be communicated to the brain.
While the article mentions this in the introduction, it doesn't mention this happening at all in the research. It talks about neurons communicating with each other. This is a long way from connecting this chip into a living brain in an animal that can still function.
While I agree that this is a fascinating article, we should make sure not to sensationalize it too much. Making chips that interface with actual brains in actual animals, even if they are snails, is still a long way off.
"Flying is the art of throwing yourself at the ground and missing." - Douglas Adams
IQ instead of GHz?
No it's not. This involves interfacing with the neurons that are already there.
As these true neural webs become more complicated, it would be interesting to see if any kind of emergent behavior was evident
Given that large collections of neurons are well known to exhibit emergent behaviour, I think it would be more interesting if they didn't.
this could be the first step to replicating a nervous system without having to rely on fetuses for stem cells. It requires no human cloning and holds immense promise
Nerve cells harvested from an animal brain can be grown in the lab. There is no need for embryonic stem cells or cloning at all. Growing them on silicon does not make this easier - in fact they will probably grown better in a petri dish.
It would definitely be cool to have a couple of these chips implanted to enhance the base memory that we are kitted with at birth
Memory in the brain is not simple storage of information. It is unlikely that pluggin a DRAM into your brain would be able to enhance your memory.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
Evolution != bruteforcing. With bruteforcing (e.g. trying to guess a password with a dictionary) there is no "being on the right path" or whatever. It's just wrong or right. Evolution is survive of the fittest, do minor changes in different direction on an existing system and let see which one will lead closer to success.(Just like sex ;-)) Take many of the fittest and do the same again. The some time take some of the not so fit and try as well the same.
On the other hand you are right: This trial and error seems to lead to better results in the long run compared to deterministic creation. But this scheme is already adopted by science. IIRC there was a distributed computing project simulating a robot with a defined task and changing the parameters of the robot. The different clients exchanged the information about the results. I don't remember anymore the name or the homepage of the project, I think it was already 4 or 5 years ago...
Trolling is a art!
Maybe something can be done about spinal cord
injuries in the future with this technology?
Quoth the article:
scientists stimulated one nerve cell to communicate with a second cell which transmitted that signal to multiple cells within the network.
Singal up (probably down too, though that is not said). That's a start. Now let me jump.
Imagine how this would feel in your own brain. Even strengthened to noticeable level by a lump of neurons, the signal would still read "beep". Now imagine being fed information through that channel. "Beep, bip beep bip bip beep". Better start training that morse.
Now let's enhance the input by adding more bits into it and running data through a digital-to-analog converter. This is where you would slowly be able to "see colors", one at a time. Low signal, cold feeling; high signal, hot feeling. That is brainable information. You can associate different patterns of these "colors" to different ideas.
But still it's not like you could see any shapes, is it?
Now add more bytes, feed them in side-by-side. That's a feed. At this point, feel nausea. Something is feeding noise into your thoughts, something you cannot possibly comprehend.
Would take a processing system not unlike vision inside the brain to translate that feed into experiences like colors, tastes, touches, then further associate these to make shapes out of the noise.
A long way.
Worth taking, of course, as research goes, but I wouldn't toss away those external displays as of yet. Have a hunch computers won't be the same, either, when we get there.
Future research will focus on interfacing silicon chips with the human brain to control artificial limbs and develop "thinking" computers.
Mostly fun!
I think, therefore thoughts exist. Ego is just an impression.
Potter has done a lot of work on the project since then and electrodes were defintely incorporated. He has linked the cultured network up to a variety of output devices, including a stylus device to 'draw', onto a robot to manuever, and a DOOM-like virtual environment. http://www.gatech.edu/news-room/release.php?id=160
http://www.wireheading.com/roborats/hybrots.html
How would that be any different than what we've had for the last 20 years?
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
Alan Cooper, author of "The Inmates are Running the Asylum" and other texts put it this way:
Q: What do you get when you cross a camera and a computer?
A: A computer.
His point is that from an interface and place-in-the-world point of view, most products that have been digitally enhanced tend to remain closer to their technology roots than their analog counterparts (with all of the usability, and I would say ethical, challenges inherient in a technologist-driven system).
That said, this is pretty frickin' cool, but the double-edged sword presented by this innovation seems both particularly sharp and far reaching. I really hope we get this one right.
"Why can't you use your powers for Good?"
Or, for a more software interpretation, it's a function that takes a bunch of boolean parameters and returns a boolean. Anyone who's ever done any programmation or computer architecture should see why you can easily process anything with this.
IAAN, and this is not a big breakthrough in any sense. Basically, this is something that was first done using manually-positioned electrodes probably twenty years ago, and now they can grow neurons on a dish that has electrodes built into it and do it that way. WoO-hAH!
The computational power of neurons comes from the way they work in groups, not the way they work alone. Therefore, it's strongly dependent upon the detailed organization of their connectivity. Grinding up a piece of brain and regrowing it on a dish will obviously not retain native connectivity. Additionally, the time it would take to manually rewire an interesting circuit by giving little localized electrical pulses (or do anything else interesting) is longer than neurons are viable in culture, and that's not a problem that's been solved yet.
I'm not saying this technology won't have important uses as a research tool, just that it won't be useful for what people here seem to think it will be useful for (high-density pornography storage). BTW, one of the more interesting characters in this field is Steve Potter, a somewhat strange guy who does some technically impressive work
Well, I find mine useful anyways, I am sure some people have mized results
"Future research will focus on interfacing silicon chips with the human brain to control artificial limbs and develop "thinking" computers." Thats one heck of a leap forward from connecting x number of snail nerves together.
XOR has the truth table:
a b aXORb
1 1 0
1 0 1
0 1 1
0 0 0
What you have described is:
e i e?i
1 1 0
1 0 1
0 1 0
0 0 0
Where ? is either &~, i.e. "e and not i", or "not if e then i". A "partially working" logical function is really just a fully working different logical function.
(C) Kaki Sain, 2011. By reading this, you have illegally copied my property to your brain.
i don't think people would be equal because the good chips would probably still be owned by bad (read: greedy) people. i mean, in theory it sounds like a nice utopian marxist wet-dream, but there is too much inertia keeping the system the way it stands. and personally, any sort of wild-und-crazy hive-mind is not something i'd ever want to participate in. the distractions would be omnipresent (you think video games are addictive now?) and any sort of rational, thoughful, political or philosophical discourse would be run over by the lovechild of classical liberalism and western capitalism / consumption.
und besides: The ads. Think of the ads!!!!