A Robot Brain from Rat Neurons
Understanding how neurons interact with each other to produce behavior is a challenge, but neuroscientists are gaining some insights from the activity of rat neurons growing in a culture dish. The neurons spontaneously organize into interconnected clusters and start sending neural impulses across the network. Neuroscientists are using electrodes placed in the culture to send electrical signals into the network and to measure the neurons' responses. When a Bluetooth device is used to transmit signals from an ultrasound sensor on a small roving robot to the culture, and the neurons' response back to the robot, the robot can use the information to avoid obstacles. Object avoidance is very simple as behavior goes, but the neuroscientists hope this strategy will help them understand how neuronal interaction contributes to human behavior, and how its malfunction produces the symptoms of epilepsy and Alzheimer's. New Scientist, 16 August, 2008, 22-23; click here for video of a robot with a rat brain.
