Brain Cells Fused with Computer Chips

valamaldoran writes "Looks like organic computers aren't too far off. Live Science has an interesting article about fusing brain neurons with silicon chips. From the article: 'The achievement could one day enable the creation of sophisticated neural prostheses to treat neurological disorders or the development of organic computers that crunch numbers using living neurons.'"

Comments

Re:Neurotransmitters

[MichaelSmith]

Don't nuerons use neurotransmitters to bridge the synapses? How is this able to send signals to hard silicons? Were the silicons created with proper receptors?

Membrane potentials (literally voltages measurable from one side of a membrane to another) can tell you what is going on in a neuron. In fact there are so many electrical signals inside a brain that a simple device like an EEG can tell you quite a bit about what is going on.

Re:Not correct

[sholden]

I really doubt it.

Children learn to catch a ball through trial and error, over time they notice what they need to do to succeed. It's not calculus, it's just that experience allows them to predict where the ball will end up. They aren't doing calculations they have just seen enough balls thrown to be able to make a prediction because they have seen how a ball travels when thrown. Just like children learn that screaming gets the TV to display their favourite show, and that flipping the light switch makes the lights turn on and off - they don't know the mechanism they've just done it enough to be able to make a prediction based on past behaviours.