Neuron-computer Interface

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]

The pounding, the throbbing, the sensitive scalp, the agony! What if you could push a button and zap it all away?

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 ]

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 ]

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]

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 patients’ lives.

[Read the article from the San Francisco Chronical]

[ Read a related Neuron News article ]

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 BBC News]

[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)]