Brains on a Chip

jhouserizer writes "The New Scientist magazine has an article reporting on new advances in keeping brain tissue alive (and working) on a "chip", with electrodes that can monitor the brain activity. Could this be a step toward computers that can learn as humans learn?"

The future?

[FosterSJC]

This can't really be the future of computing can it? I mean, we all are aware of the biggest difference between computers and thu human brain. Humans have great pattern recognition, while computers have great calculating/processing powers. Slicing pieces of brain and attaching them to chips hardly seems likely to enhance either the brain's computational ability or the chip's recognizing abilities. If anything, this is a step forward in facilitating communications between man and machine. I could see uses in reversing paralysis, but thought-upgrades or what have you are a long way off.

Re:The future?

[Myco]

You're being too literal here -- assuming that the end result will look just like a particular intermediate step. Nobody's saying we're going to build computers out of brain tissue. Well, maybe somebody is but that's not the point.

In order to potentially imitate the human brain, we still need to learn a lot more about it. Since there's no manpage for the brain, it's a black-box problem and we have to reverse engineer it by trying various combinations of inputs and outputs (as well as analyzing the physical structure, of course). This new technique allows us to do so more effectively, hence improves our ability to understand. That's all.

For those who didn't read the article...

[Kenrod]

The article is about medical applications, NOT computing. This doesn't have anything to do with computing. The researchers have found a way to keep larger portions of the brain alive so they can monitor the effects of psychoactive drugs. This may lead to new avenues of research for Alzheimers, Parkinsons, ALS, and many mental disorders. The chip is actually a tiny EEG. The first product is targeted to be an anti-anxiety drug.

I think the most interesting aspect of this story is the living consciousness aspect. Can this piece of brain (or pieces intercommunicating) which is biologically active, become self-aware? Although these experiments have only been done on rats, if it were human brain tissue, would it be "alive" in an ethical, moral, or legal sense? These questions are probably several years away from being relevant, but is there any doubt we are heading down that road?