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Author name: Matthew T. Dearing

Cultured Neurons Given a Body

Neuron-computer Interface / / 1 Comment

Can a clump of loose neurons extracted from a rat reconnect and grow their own brain? Steve Potter, professor of biomedical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is trying to do just that with his research to integrate cultured neurons into a functioning robot device.

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 ]

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Channeling Nerve Growth

Brain Development / / Leave a Comment

Don’t loose your nerves. You might not get them back.

It’s an well know “fact” that once a brain cell dies, it won’t grow back. Scientists are continuing to discover that this is not always the case, as has been previously discussed here in Neuron News. More developments from a United States government lab is continuing to show that damaged nerve cells might be coaxed into rejuvenation.

Surya Mallapragada, an Ames Laboratory associate in Materials Chemistry, has developed micro channels in degradable polymers that can guide growing axons to fill in gaps of important nervous system wiring caused by some sort of damage.

There has been some success with nerves in rats, but they are still learning about how this approach will work in the central nervous system comprised of the brain, spinal cord and optic nerve.

[ Read the article from the Ames Laboratory ]

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UPDATE: Blind Man Sees Stars

Bionics / / Leave a Comment

(This is an update on a previous article in Neuron News on the first successful visual prosthetic device.)It’s still primitive, but the work coming from the Dobelle Institute is providing critical proof-of-principle results that prosthetic devices integrated directly with our brain can replace lost function.

This article is written in a loose “story-telling” way, which lends itself not only to an enjoyable read, but you are able to quickly see into the excitement and difficulty of this sort of technological progress. Read through this article, and discover how a “plugged in” blind man can see again.

Well, the blind man still can’t really see exactly like people with “normal” vision. Instead, Dobelle’s patients have their brain retrain itself to interpret special stimuli generated from a computer chip based on information from a video camera. This stimuli is directly input into the patient’s brain via a series of connected wires.

The ability of the brain to quickly adapt to new inputs so that it can successfully function in its environment is one of the most amazing and most poorly understood features of our brain. Think that this “re-trainable feature” is crazy? Well, you can actually experience it yourself, as did the author in this article. You can read about how his own brain re-learned in a very short amount of time how to interpret new visual stimuli.

In the lab of Mark Humayun at the University of Southern California (see http://visionscience.usc.edu for more information), the author was given a special pair of computer-controlled glasses that distorted his vision. Through the special glasses the author could initially only see bright blobs of light. But, as the neurons in his brain began to work on these new inputs, his brain re-learned how to see!

Our brains are made up of dynamic squishy material. It is capable of many powerful and adaptable abilities, many of which we may never be able to personally experience. Trying on these glasses from Humayun’s lab would be an incredible experience, and I hope to have the opportunity to try them on myself someday!

[Read the article from Wired Magazine]

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Like Brain Like Computer

Neuron-computer Interface / / Leave a Comment

Scientists and sci-fi authors have been comparing the human brain to computers for decades. Many expect that future computers will become so advanced that they will develop their own consciousness. Others claim that this goal will be impossible following our current design technologies of computational electronics.

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]

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Reconnecting with Cloned Neurons

Brain Development / / Leave a Comment

Toss in some cloned neurons into a gaping hole in your spinal cord, and what do you get? It’s very likely you might just find yourself walking again in no time at all.

This is at least what scientists at the University Of South Florida Health Sciences Center are anticipating. Instead of plugging in a device that relies on silicon chip-interfaced brain cells to replace damaged nervous communication links, Prof. Samuel Saporta and his group directly transplant neurons grown from a special type of cancer cell. These neurons connect up with the existing network on their own without any outside control.

This is a very critical concept that we must understand in more detail, not only for the above application, but also for making neuron devices. If we want to be able to control the activity of an implanted device, we must be able to design the neurons in such a way that they will properly communicate with the recipient’s existing neural network.

Neuron are capable of connecting up to other neurons in functional ways on their own, which an example of “self-organization” (to throw in a buzz-word). Before neurotechnologies will every be widely useful, we must understand the self-organizational properties of neurons–as has been indirectly witnessed by Saporta’s team–in order to guide the proper development of neural prosthetic devices.

[Read the article from ScienceDaily Magazine]

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Preventative Maintenance for Neurons

Brain Development / / Leave a Comment

Once again, scientists are discovering new reasons why the adage that your brain cells never grow back is not entirely correct. The article below describes the recent results from Dr. Marc Tessier-Lavigne of Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Stanford University where his group fed a special molecule to a neuron and then cut it (in a rat, of course). The neuron’s structures grew back after the injury giving some clues as to how we might be able to build on this technique to help humans repair a damaged nervous system.

[Read the article from Yahoo! News]

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Last updated June 20, 2022