[Vision2020] 11-04-04 CNN: 'Brain' in a dish flies flight simulator

[Art Deco aka W. Fox]

'Brain' in a dish flies flight simulator
Thursday, November 4, 2004 Posted: 7:51 AM EST (1251 GMT)


(CNN) -- 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 University of Georgia, 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."
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