Today I came across a fascinating research work that I want to share with this community. Researchers at Cortical Labs managed to create what they call DishBrain.

Around 800,000 brain cells were linked to a computer by high-density multielectrode arrays (HD-MEA). Those electrodes can both stimulate the cells and record their activity. To test the learning ability of the cells, the computer generated a game of Pong, which I am pasting below from their experiment in case someone is not aware of it:

The goal is to not let touch the ball left side of the wall, the braincells controlled the moveable paddle to bounce the ball away. To make braincells play the game, computer sent signals which were applied via HD-MEA to indicate the ball position, it also monitored the electrical pulses coming from cells.

Ofcourse at first, there was no reason for braincells to play the game. So they had to simulate them using electrical signals. If they hit the ball, the received a same pulse of signal, if they missed, they received noisy unpredictable signal. It was based on Free Energy Principle [2] which states brain cells wants to predict what going on, so they chose predictable choice which was hitting the ball as the signal was consistent with every hit. This strategy worked and the braincells moved the paddle Infront of the ball. It was found that human braincells played it better than mouse cells. However, braincells used weren't even equal to that of brain of cockroach.

According to Cortical Labs there are many advantages to organic-digital intelligence. Lower power costs, more intuition, insight and creativity in our intelligences. Machine Learning algorithms are not perfect copies of the way an organic neural network function. Besides learning, it can lead to new approach to studying brain function, drug effects, and even serve as a testbed for therapeutic interventions, without the need for animal models.

Do you think we can use soft tissues instead of silicon in future for intelligence and computing? Could this be a better replacement to digital solutions like Artificial Intelligence? Do you think it can help in health and medicine? What are your opinions?

A visualizer of their system is available at https://spikestream.corticallabs.com/

References:

[1] https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00806-6

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn2787

Question

Question

Brain cells in a dish learned to play Pong game