An Organic Computer Using Four Wired-Together Rat Brains

Jason Koebler writes: The brains of four rats have been interconnected to create a "Brainet" capable of completing computational tasks better than any one of the rats would have been able to on its own. Explains Duke University's Dr. Miguel Nicolelis: "Recently, we proposed that Brainets, i.e. networks formed by multiple animal brains, cooperating and exchanging information in real time through direct brain-to-brain interfaces, could provide the core of a new type of computing device: an organic computer. Here, we describe the first experimental demonstration of such a Brainet, built by interconnecting four adult rat brains."

Comments

Re:Ethics?

[alexgieg]

The line the OP suggested isn't arbitrary, it's pretty objective. Beings with a nervous system and a brain suffer more than beings with just a nervous system, which in turn suffer more than being with mere nociception, which in turn suffer something, compared to being with none of those, who suffer nothing.

Not harming being who can feel excruciating pain would cause our scientific research to stop? No, it'd just advance at a slight slower speed.

So, why then do we harm them? For most people, because we can. And if "might makes right" is what most go with, all the power to them. When the ethics of might eventually bites them back, it's nothing but their own fault.

Re:Unlikely

[dinfinity]

From the article:

"Then, the monkeys' brains were wired together [...]"

So that doesn't tell us shit. On to the paper:

"Electrophysiological recordings
A Multineuronal Acquisition Processor (64 channels, Plexon Inc, Dallas, TX) was used to record neuronal spikes, as previously described15. Briefly, differentiated neural signals were amplified (20000–32,000×) and digitized at 40kHz. Up to four single neurons per recording channel were sorted online (Sort client 2002, Plexon inc, Dallas, TX).

Intracortical electrical microstimulation
Intracortical electrical microstimulation cues were generated by an electrical microstimulator (Master 8 , AMPI, Jerusalem, Israel) controlled by custom Matlab script (Nattick, USA) receiving information from a Plexon system over the internet. Patterns of 8–20 (bipolar, biphasic, charge balanced; 200sec) pulses at 20–120Hz were delivered to S1. Current intensity varied from 10–100A."

So, we're talking about roughly a maximum of 64 * 4 = 256 neurons (at 40KHz) participating per brain. It's not that many, but also not few for an artificial neural network. Because that's what happened. The researcher trained the mice (via reinforcement learning) on specific problems after interconnection. He didn't interconnect them and immediately let them perform some random complex task:

"In one test, for instance, different rats brains were given different barometric pressure and temperature information, and then the computational power of the Brainet itself was used to calculate the probability that it would rain (given those inputs) at a rate higher than chance.
Nicolelis said that, essentially, he created a "classic artificial neural network using brains." In that sense, it's not artificial at all."