Tens of thousands of living brain cells have been used to build a simple computer that can recognise patterns of light and electricity. It c...
A computer built using tens of thousands of living brain cells can recognise simple patterns of light and electricity. It could eventually be incorporated into a robot that also uses living muscle tissues. The neuron-based computer Andrew Dou, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Artificially intelligent algorithms inspired by the brain called neural networks have been used for everything from chatbots to searching for new laws of physics. Normally, these algorithms run on conventional computers, but Andrew Dou at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and his colleagues wondered whether they could instead use actual living brain cells – neurons – as part of the set-up. The team began by growing around 80,000 neurons derived from reprogrammed mouse stem cells in a dish. The process was similar to that used for creating brain organoids, also known as mini-brains, which are clumps of neurons that have been used as simple information processors, as well as for studying intelligence itself. The main difference is that the neurons in the new device were arranged in a flat, two-dimensional layer. To complete the computer, the researchers placed the neurons below an optical fibre and onto a grid of electrodes so that the neurons could be stimulated with both electricity and light. The electrodes could also detect when the neurons produced their own electrical signals in response. All of this was housed in a palm-sized box, which, in turn, was placed in an incubator to keep the cells alive. Conventional neural networks can easily learn how to distinguish different patterns of signals, so the researchers attempted to train the…