Can several hundred thousand rat neurons living in culture control the movements of a mechanical robot? Apparently to some extent so far, as researchers, including Dr. Ben Whalley, at the University of Reading have created a working "rat-brain-controlled" robot.

The controlling unit is, however, much less than that of a full rat brain, but in many respects it is actually much more interesting and exciting: the controller is a dish of rat neurons growing and interconnecting on top of an electrode array, which records electrical activity as well as electrically stimulates the cultured neuron network, and this all sits in a temperature-controlled environment in the lab safely separated from the actual robot. Wireless technology transmits the electrical information to and from from the culture and a mobile block with wheels and sonar sensors.

The electrical signals are filtered through software into movement controls for the robot. When the robot bumps into a wall, the sonar returns a signal to the culture dish to provide electrical feedback to the network. To date, the research has created a moving robot, and the team is now working to "train" the living neural network to appropriately respond to its environment... i.e., "don't bump into the wall when you hear it coming."

The group is particularly interested in how their basic understanding of this neural network can create memories, and how it will respond to imposed degradations of the physical network. This may lead to further clues into the progression of neurological disorders, including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Even with the focus on medical advancements for human disease, this research program at Reading is extremely exciting as a pure application of neurotechnology by working to develop a direct neuron-computer interface, and their results will be quite useful for the broader technological advancement of neurotech devices.

Taking direct electrical measurements from a living brain and even from a single neuron cell requires an invasive connection between the localized electrochemical environment in the cell and a sharp, prickly, prodding metal stake of death.

An electrode might sound harmless, but it can take the form of a gigantic (in the reference frame of a tiny neuron) metallic (or other electrical conducting material) needle that could either damage living tissue, or be rejected by the hosting biological system and quickly bombarded in tissue to effectively disengage the pointy invader.

image courtesy PhysOrg.com

Recently, a collaboration lead by Edward Keefer from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, has discovered that coating these harmful--but, necessarily formed--electrical recording devices with the ever popular carbon nanotube is the neuron's newest fuzzy best friend. The nanotubues act to not only enhance the transmitted signals received from directly implanted electrodes, but they have been shown to be bio-compatible, so that they might even minimize the damage caused to the specimen. In fact, Keefer claims the efficiency of the cell-electrode interface is improved by at least one-thousand times.

The development of neurotechnological devices--hardware that interconnects directly with nervous tissue and even individual neurons--is absolutely dependent on not only the production of electrical connections that will result in highly sensitive signal transmission, but the cells will must also like to have these needles sticking around. The carbon nanotube coating approach could be a critical step in advancing neurotechnology to a future level of high-res recording devices as well as localized, highly-controllably stimulus systems.

Experimental demonstrations of apparent computer control of a living brain is largely based on the software's ability (and the ability of the corresponding human programmer) to train itself to identify specific, repeatable brain signals and tag these with specific, observed motions of the living test subject. [ READ MORE ] So, the monkey's arm moves to the left, and a certain picture of brain activity is recorded. The monkey's arm moves to the left again, and a similar brain activity pattern is again mapped.

There must be a connection, right?

Next, the computer is connected to a robotic arm to simulate the monkey's arm. The computer records a certain brain activity that was previously tagged when the monkey moved its arm to the left ... so, the computer tells the robotic motors to move the simulating arm to the left.

Voilà! Computer control between a monkey's brain and a robotic arm.

Certainly, this is a magnificent neurotechnological feat, but the experiment is entirely based on a previously mapped out look-up table. There is very little information about the fundamental behavior of the monkey's active neuron network, which may or may not behave in precisely reproducible ways each time its arm moves to the left.

What if a neuron in the recorded activity dies? Well, the monkey can presumably still move its arm around, but the specific network pattern of electrical activity might change and might not match the look-up table stored in the computer's memory. The computer might nix the new recorded signal that occurs when the monkey moves its arm to the left because the software code doesn't understand how the network adapts at a fundamental level.

Developing software that tries to understand the neuron-computer interface at a more basic level is the goal of Lakshminarayan Srinivasan at MIT. This work is essentially the starting point of writing an all-purpose BASIC neurological language for the brain.

The general idea is building a software language that looks at a broader swath of brain activity and links neural action with its probable relation to a specific motor task. This provides for flexibility in the software communication so that it won't lock up and give the user the Blue Screen of Death just because one neuron didn't fire the same way it did last week.

So far, Srinivasan's work is entirely based on simulations, and is currently being expanded to test with interfaces to living test subjects. So, it will be very interesting to watch the results of these new developments to discover if this programming approach is compatible with talking directly with our neuron networks.

I would like to emphasize here that I in no way want to discount the significance and the importance of the successes of "Bionic Monkey" research to date. These new techniques are absolutely critical and very exciting. But, we must be clear that this does not yet reach the notion of a pure neuron-computer interface. There is still a long way to go in continuing the advances of neurotechnology to discover the deeper understanding of neuron network function... and this long road is still very exciting!

Also take a look at the earlier work...

It's already 2029 and the unthinkable has happened. Human beings are drastically altered into a new existence; a new species because of profound technological advances of computing power, which now equals that of the human brain. Welcome to The Singularity.

It's not clear if this prediction is a good thing or a bad thing. What do you think? First broadcast nearly two years ago, the BBC produced a hyper-dramatic review of the run-up to this potential event. As technological developments continue to inch forward into brain-computer interfacing as well as advanced understandings of brain function, it is important to consider the possible ramifications of these developments. This is where the ethics of neurotechnology comes into play. However, we must be entirely reasonable about these considerations, and unfortunately this BBC broadcast is a bit--OK, it's nearly obnoxiously--fear-mongering about where we might be headed.

(My wife--who is a huge Harry Potter fan--also questions their contract rights with using the theme music!)

In particular, let's assume for the moment that computing "power" (however this might be defined) does match that of the "power" of the human brain. The projection of the Singularity Event is that this will somehow directly lead to a fundamental change in the human being... a Human v2.0, if you will. Hopefully, our global society will complete a thorough beta test before releasing the final upgrade to the general public!

But, there really is an enormous leap in this assumption of change. If we see computing power resemble computational abilities of humans, then why would this necessarily change us? It certainly could change us fundamentally, but the only way for this to occur is to also have the technology to integrate the human brain with a computer.

Precisely fabricated computer chips and mushes of neuron networks are different. And, they are different at basic, fundamental levels. We can pretend to make software look like neuron networks, but the software is only processed by computer chips. There really is no comparison to how each computational entity functions. So, fully interconnecting the two so that one might fundamentally change the other is a non-trivial task--to say the least--and may even be fundamentally impossible.

Although the following episode feeds a bit too much on the fear of what could happen to humanity with the ultimate success of neurotechnology, it still should be considered and reviewed for a better understanding of how to approach the developments.

Google's algorithms somehow know how to find needles in haystacks. Cyberspace is gigantic and it seems to only take milliseconds to find any little random tidbit of information you might be looking for. In fact, this search finds 378,000 results in 0.20 seconds or less [ supercalifragilisticexpialidocious ].

Just like the Internet, the brain is a very complicated network. Although the brain is still quite poorly understood, it is very probably that it is significantly more complex than the Internet network of today. Google contains a detailed and efficient map of the Internet, which allows it to quickly zip you along the pathways to your desired destination.

The brain, on the other hand, has a network that might not be so efficient... but it works and works pretty well for our environment. In particular, we store many memories over our lifetime, but we don't have a font-and-center realization of each and every memory and every point in time. We are able to access certain memories when needed, although we certainly find that having special cues can help bring about certain memories on command.

So, maybe Google could invest in a neuroprosthetic computer chip hat first maps the neural connections in our brain and then takes cues to help us retrieve specific memory information when needed.

The network mapping process is certainly not trivial. Research in this area is vital, and is the key component to furthering the understanding of brain function. But, once the map is known, then Google-type algorithms might be particularly useful for traveling the network's paths to find information we need ... in milliseconds.

Gary Marcus, professor of psychology at New York University, wrote a very interesting review in The New York Times that further explores this idea...

Last year, the National Institute of Health provided funding for another important collaboration between Brown University, Cyberkinetics, and the Cleveland FES Center. Lead by Arto Nurmikko, a Brown professor of engineering and physics, the academic-industry team is expanding the functionality and portability of BrainGate with a scaled-down, fully-implantable device that records neuronal signals and digitally transmits the information via fiber optic and wireless communication.

The multi-year funding supports a human trial of a prototype being developed, and will continue advancements in implantable devices to bridge communication between the nervous system and computer controlled hardware that can assist with motor skills for paralyzed patients.

"Next-generation neurotechnology possible with NIH grant"
EurekAlert! August 2, 2007 [READ]

"A Microelectrode/Microelectronic Hybrid Device for Brain Implantable Neuroprothesis Applications"
the Overview Research Poster from Nurmikko's Group [VIEW]

The next important step to ensuring a successful neuron device is to have the neurons actually communicate with one another, so that the new electrical stimulation can be processed by the brain. This communication between neurons actually happens by the direct transfer of chemicals from one neuron to the next via very small knobs, called synapses. If stimulated by electrical activity in the neuron, these act like shower heads that spray specific chemicals into a branch, or dendrite, of a neighboring neuron. These chemicals then determine how the neighbor neuron will respond to the first neuron.

Mark Peterman and Harvey Fishman at Stanford University, are working on another approach for neurotechnology by creating a silicon device that contains "artificial synapses" that directly deliver the necessary chemicals of communication to neurons.

Read more about this very interesting development reported in New Scientist.

[ Read the public release announcement on Eureka Alert ]

[ Read the article from New Scientist ]

03/27/2003 UPDATE
[ Read an article from ITWeb in South Africa ]

This news item has been splashing into headlines all over the world yesterday and today, so we're trying to keep track of the journalists' take on the issue. As we keep finding more links, we'll update this post.

Theodore Berger and his team at the University of Southern California have been working for years to develop mathematical models that represent the appropriate computations performed in the hippocampus of the brain, the area of your brain which is widely accepted as a major storage container and processor of memories. These models would then guide the design and fabrication of an actual silicon chip to be directly integrated with the brain tissue.

However, fully understanding the mechanisms of specific computations in our brain is still beyond scientists' desperate grasp, so Berger's team listened to neural activity and attempted to encode what they saw it into silicon.

To accomplish this, a silicon chip is fabricated with tiny electrodes--basically little metal pads and wires--that sit nearby active, non-damaged neurons and receive their electrical signals that are supposed to be providing "input" to damaged neurons. These captured input signals are transmitted by the embedded silicon chip to another chip sitting outside the brain. The external chip is like a mini-computer that processes these electrical signals according to Berger's model of how the hippocampus is supposed to function. Based on this on-chip processing, it finally sends new electrical signals back down to the non-damaged neurons.

These computer-generated electrical signals are meant to exactly replace the electrical signals that would have resulted from the neurons receiving the original input, but couldn't do so because they were damaged in some way.

Important note: This prototype brain prosthetic has been specifically programmed to function in a certain way--a way that neurons in a rat's hippocampus presumably communicate. A successful test of this device will show that if the hippocampus is "turned off" in an animal and the device "turned on", then normal brain activity resumes.

This would be a great step forward in developing technologies that replace damaged function in our nervous systems. Forgot where your keys are? Can't find where you placed your presentation material due to your boss in exactly 1.2 minutes? No problem, just don't forget to turn on your "memory chip".

Maybe that's where we are headed, but not by just copying our neural activity from when we were still healthy. One of the articles below mentions the concern that since what we consider to be our "self", likely has a great deal to do with our memories, then a prosthetic device that has strict and static on-board processing rules, might somehow alter who we really "are".

Certainly, more must be understood about how our brain functions in general, but this upcoming test is still very exciting!

[ Read the article from the New Scientist ]

[ Read the article from Ananova ]

[ Read the article from MSNBC.com ]

[ Read the article from BBC News ]

[ Read the article from the Guardian ]

Now Serving Brains on a Chip!

Infineon Technologies, a tech company in Munich, Germany, recently announced that it has developed a silicon device that is capable of recording electrical signals from brain slices. They call it the "Neuro-Chip" and it contains over 16,000 electrodes, spaced every 8 microns, and records the cells' activity 2,000 times per second.

The basic design of recording the electrical activity of a neuron sitting on a silicon wafer has certainly been done before, primarily in the world of academia at many institutions [University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Cornell University, University of Michigan, and others]. However, this is one of the first examples of a research company claiming significant progress toward a commercializable project for scientists to purchase and use in their research. This is certainly an exciting development!

There is an important idea to keep in mind with how useful the information pumped out of this little neurodevice will be. Infineon's chip has tons of electrodes spread out over the silicon surface recording the electrical activity en masse. The recording capability is presumably quite sensitive and capable of pulling out a great deal of information.

Scientists will have to dig in deep, though, to figure out exactly how to relate this sort of collective information to how the neuron network actually functions. It will likely be found that even more specific electrical recordings from each individual neuron is required to gain any insight into how the neurons work together.

[Read an article from Australian Broadcasting Corporation News Online]

[Read an article from Electronic Business Online]

[Visit the company website]

Extreme headaches (and we're talking about those very rare extreme cases) are first attacked with drugs and more drugs. But, if the pulsating brain tissue isn't tamed, then some doctors are trying to directly stimulate nerves in the brain with a little, directed electrical shock.

Our body senses pain when certain nerves become active and send pulses of electricity to our brain to tell it something is wrong in the nerve's neck of the woods. If we aren't able to repair the problem causing the "pain receptor" nerves to be quiet, then another approach is to block or mask its electrical activity.

Implanting an electrode near an over-active nerve and passing electricity to directly stimulate the nerve has been seen to block the pain messages sent to the brain. The fact that this method has had some initial experimental success is very interesting because you might first think that this stimulation would enhance the pain signals. Somehow the additional electrical activity around the nerve acts to confuse the signals to the brain, and makes that throbbing feeling vanish.

[ Read a related Neuron News article ]

[ Read the article from Yahoo! News/AP Health ]

[ Read the news release from Rush Medical Center ]

If provided with the correct environment to survive, neurons remain quite active little creatures and tend to find ways to reconnect with other neurons. The neurons will begin talking to one another, and their communication links will even evolve based on input from their external environment.

Prof. Potter's group has developed a small robot that takes the electrical signals from a network of living brain cells and translates them into some form of physical motion for the bot. Sensors located all over the robot then provide electrical feedback to the neuron network after, say, the robot runs into the wall.

The network's activity is carefully watched, and some level of biological development has been observed. This is certainly a very exciting and interesting advancement in making functional connections between living neurons and computers.

[ Read the article on MSNBC ]

[ Learn more about Prof. Potter's work ]

The scientists reported about in this article from The Nando Times, a top technologist at IBM and a neurosurgeon from the University of Vermont, claim to have had their own light bulb blink on several years ago about the amazing connection between computers and the brain.

There is a growing understanding that as computers become more powerful, their efficiency is significantly decreasing. For advances to continue, especially after fundamental limits are reached after we successfully build computers with transistors composed of single atoms, new architectures will be required.

Our amazing brain's structure developed from millions of years of evolution will guide us toward new computer designs for this millennium.

[Read the article from The Nando Times]

Got a headache? Reach for your favorite pain reliever pill fast... Or, someday you might punch in a code in your hand-held computer and the mind-numbing throbbing would quickly fade away.

Neurosurgeons have long tried techniques to alter the function of spinal cord and brain circuitry. These have been as invasive as cutting tissue and removing small sections of the brain. Patients have ranged from those having severe pain to others with psychiatric conditions (think about what happened to Jack Nicholson in "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest").

Now, new techniques are being developed to directly apply a little stimulation from an electrode to a section of the brain handling motor control. Initial attempts are resulting in unexpected and interesting effects of reducing chronic nerve pain and inducing other potentially therapeutic activity elsewhere in the brain.

For the potentially more controversial surgeries to "fix" patients with severe psychiatric conditions who don't respond to medication or other therapies, doctors hope that strategically-placed electrodes may be an effective treatment to bring some semblance of normalcy back into these patient's lives.

This article came out about a month before Neuron News began, so hopefully you will be able to forgive it's delay. Although news about the "Ratbot" has already spanned the journalism phase space, only at Neuron News will you also receive reasonable commentary!

Dr. Sanjiv Talwar and colleagues at the State University of New York, successfully implanted a neuro-remote control to guide a rat through an obstacle course. With a radio-receiver backpack mounted on the little rodent, commands from a researcher's nearby laptop stimulated areas in the brain associated with the whisker sensation.

Zap one of the whiskers and the rat feels like it bumped into something. Subsequently changing its course to avoid the "virtual wall", the rat receives a second zap directed to some "feel good" part of its brain.

"Ooo yeah, that was nice. Maybe there's another one of those over... here!"

This neural control and feedback mechanism allowed scientists to guide the rat to do things it normally would not like to do. For example, the robot rat didn't hesitate to walk across well-lighted, open spaces.

The anticipation is that these rodents would be used as real-life guinea pigs to maneuver through earthquake-damaged areas, or wind though a mind field, until it... well... stumbles across one.

Although this report is everywhere, check out these UK versions, along with the original report in Nature:

[Read the article from The Guardian]

[A general report from Nature]

Reference
Talwar, S. K. et al. Rat navigation guided by remote control.. Nature, 417, 37 - 38, (2002). [Read (Subscription required)]

A potentially more useful application could significantly aid individuals who are retrofitted with a prosthetic limb due to an injury. For example, you could just think about picking up that mouth-watering can of soda, instead of contracting shoulder muscles in complicated way to position the arm into place.

Brown University researchers implanted a small device into a Rhesus monkey's brain to record the electrical activity from an amazingly small number of cortical neurons (they claim only six!). The monkey moved a cursor around on a computer screen with his hands on a joystick, then the device output the electrical activity from the set of connected neurons. The scientists next determined a mathematical model that will relate the neuron firing to moving the cursor.

Finally, they disconnected the control of the joystick, but allowed the monkey to continue to use it, and instead connect up the neuron device. The monkey continued to think about playing the cursor-moving game, and the cursor moved!

It's been over 200 years since science has seen the connection between biology and technology when Luigi Galvani first stimulated a frog's leg to contract with an electrical pulse. However, we are still stuck in a nescient stage of electrically coupling nerve cells will man-made devices.

Peter Fromherz of the Membrane and Neurophysics Department at the Max Plank Institute is guiding his lab to figure out how computer chips can be used to support neurons functioning in a living system, and even help us learn more about how the brain works.

The techniques they are developing involve manually placing large snail nerve cells (100 microns, which is quite large as far as brain cells go) on top of a patterned electrode on a silicon wafer. The electrode is surrounded by a fence of pillars that act to constrain the cell body from movement while it grows branching axons and dendrites to connect up with neighboring cells. Currently, they are focusing on establishing a contact-free method of interfacing where the nerve cell never actually comes into direct contact with the electrode and silicon surface.

Fromherz cautiously approaches the expectations of neuron device research. The brain is connected in such an enormously complicated tangle of dendrites that it is still unclear exactly how far we will succeed by interfacing the nervous system with semiconductor technology.

Fromherz also rightly stresses that any comparison between the computational methods of today's computers with that of a neuron network is completely misguided. Our brain's neuron networks function insanely slower than your common desktop computer. Still, your thought processes are much more powerful than your PC's internal chugging. The computational mechanisms in biological nervous systems are not understood in any complete way, and a significant advancement will need to occur before we will be able to truly harness in the power of interconnected neurons.

[Visit the lab]

This group at Brown University is trying to develop an implantable electrode array that will transmit your thoughts into a corresponding action via a connected computer, robot, or electrodes elsewhere in your body.

Currently, they are working to provide patients with debilitating diseases, like locked-in syndrome, with more physical control in their lives. These research efforts will prove to be critical stepping stones for making neuron devices commonplace prosthetics and cosmetics in our culture.

The research group is also trying to finance a company, called Cyberkinetics, Inc., to help bring these new technologies into the marketplace.