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Rat Brains Fly Planes
An anonymous reader writes "According to The Age newspaper, scientists at the University of Florida have created neural cell cultures capable of flying an airplane using rat neurons. No actual planes are involved (yet), but the disassembled bits of rodent are already capable of level flight when hooked up to a simulator of an F-22."
All they said was that they hooked it up to electrodes and a computer to train the brain cells to fly the plane in simulator. Is this basically the same as training an artificial neural network or is there some more complicated biological factors involved than the just shocking the cells when they veer off course?
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I think it's significant that they chose a flight simulator instead of a more traditional "game" to teach the newly formed brain.
Here's a couple of points to remember:
The difference between the makeup, function, and behavior of a given type of cells between one species and another is so insignificant (remember, we're talking on a cellular level) that they can generally be ignored. You can almost always assume that a given cell type in one organism will behave identically to a parallel cell in another. The species that the cell came from is all but insignificant.
Brain cells, (in humans and in other species) are amazingly versatile. While capable of specializing (vision centers, speech centers, etc.), these cells seem to be capable of taking on any function necessary for the benefit of the organism. For example, humans brains in which a specific part has been damaged (such as the vision center) have actually re-mapped other cell groups to take over that function. They do what they have to to survive.
Brain cells are cooperative in nature: if placed in proximity to eachother, they'll work together for their common good (read: survival). They'll "instinctively" form a structure similar to how they're pre-designed to work. They'll form a brain--as fully functional as the situation permits. It doesn't necessarily matter how you arrange them, the brain cells can sort those details out--somehow.
Brains look for order. We've known that for ages. Finding order is how a brain learns, it's how the brain separates relevant details from the background noise. The ability to identify order is the whole basis of intelligence. Every sense, every stimulus, every aspect of the brain has order-seeking overtones. This feature of brains is so absolutely universal that it must be deeply ingrained into the neurons themselves.
Put those details together, and you end up with the following scenario: if you take neurons out of an organism and place them together, they'll form a brain. Probably not as complex or capable a brain as you started with, but a brain none the less. Actually this is the ideal brain to study, as you're starting "from scratch": there's no evolutionary specialization involved. Each cell will attempt to make sense of its neighbors, and as a result, the organism as a whole will attempt to make sense of its environment (brain processes are the ultimate in emergent algorithms). The brain will follow this behavior as if it were necessary to the brain's survival.
Which brings us to the flight simulator. If you instead had the brain play with a chessboard or a clock, the results would probably be unimpressive. But a flight simulator--that's really the perfect environment. There's the potential for the brain to actually order its environment: there are equilibrium points that the brain will eventually find where it has greater control over its inputs. Assuming that flying too hight or too low creates a more chaotic state, you can likely expect the brain to learn to avoid it.
In fact, I'd be very much surprised if you didn't actually see the brain cells start to specialize. Some cells will become responsibe for directly manipulating the flight controls based on the inputs from the brain. Some will attempt to maintain aircraft equilibrium in absence of any other input from the brain. Others will control the aircraft as a whole, their location in the network giving them a better overall picture of the situation than, say, the cells near the controls. Furthermore, I fully expect some cells to not participate at all: cells that are "out of the loop", so to speak, will proably cease most activity to avoid disturbing the overall process.
I, personally, have been waiting to see this very experiment conducted and see the results. I think this is very exciting science
did you read the article at newscientist.com about rats singing (actually mice, but the author claims that his rat was a diva)....i get it in print, but it's now online - at newscientst, search for the article "romantic rodents"..."Tim Holy and Zhongsheng Guo of Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, Missouri, recorded the vocalisations of male mice when they were presented with female pheromones and found they were far more complex than expected." and of course, rats are much more complicated creatures, right? have you seen the crispin glover remake of willard?
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I read a sci-fi book about these neural networks many years ago. It featured a computer, with a rat brain, that simulated weather changes, or something like that. It wasn't powerful enough, and the plot involved a scientist turning to a human brain and all the ramifications etc... Does anyone rememeber that book (or something like it, my memory of it is pretty fuzzy).
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I'm not saying the F-22 can "fly itself" but the latest generations of fighter planes have been increasingly geared toward reducing the complexity of flight. Get these rat brains to fly twin engine propeller planes with simple/no computers and it'll be noteworthy.
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Interesting comment, since such a culture of cells would have no immune system. There is also the issue of having to feed the cells somehow, which makes it unlikely that this could be implemented without human oversight (i.e. computers couldn't just be left to run like they can now).
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I'm curious what the rat brain was actually controlling. An F-22 is inherently unstable without computer control (normal planes have a tendency to re-equilibrate to level flight, whereas an F-22 has a tendency to fall out of the sky). Was the rat brain subsituting for computer control? or was it just providing direcional input like a normal fighter pilot would? F-22s can literally fly themselves. Slapping a rat brain on top doesn't exactly make that better.