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Franken-Rodent: Rat Neurons in a Dish Play Flight Simulator
By Bill Christensen
posted: 26 October 2004
06:39 am ET
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In his excellent 1999 novel
Starfish, science
fiction writer Peter Watts wrote about
"cultured brains on a slab" - a "smart gel - that could pilot a plane
as well as a person. Now, University of Florida biomedical engineer Dr. Thomas
DeMarse has created a "brain in a dish" that can interact with a computer flight
simulation.
The "brain" is a small puddle of 25,000 living
neurons taken from a rat's brain and cultured in a glass dish.
"It's essentially a dish with 60
electrodes arranged in a grid at the bottom," DeMarse said. "Over that we put
the living cortical neurons from rats, which rapidly begin to reconnect
themselves, forming a living neural network - a brain."
The multi-electrode grill is
connected to a personal computer running a flight simulation program. The
individual neurons are distributed randomly at the beginning of the experiment,
and are not connected. The aircraft simulation of an F-22 fighter jet feeds data
into the grid about flight conditions; whether the plane is flying straight and
level or not. The neurons begin to organize themselves, forming connections to
each other. The neurons analyze the data and respond by sending signals to the
plane's controls.
At first, the simulated plane drifts randomly. But
the neural network slowly learns; currently, the brain can control the pitch and
roll of the simulated craft in most weather conditions, including storms and
hurricane-force winds.
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"My precioussss ..."
University of Florida researcher Thomas
DeMarse holds a glass dish on
October 12, 2004, containing
a "brain" -- a living network of rat brain
cells connected
to electrodes. Credit:
UofF
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DeMarse points out that, while computers have fast
processing speeds, they can't approach the flexibility of the human brain.
Certain kinds of computation, like pattern recognition, is difficult to program
into a computer. Peter Watts points out this very same fact in his choice of
living neurons as pilots:
Humans had always been able to integrate
3-D spatial information better than the machines that kept trying to replace
them...
Until now, apparently...
(Read more from
Starfish smart
gels)
(This Science
Fiction in the News story used with permission from Technovelgy.com -
where science meets fiction.)
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