BRAINS WORK
BETTER than computers. They’re faster, more creative, and (almost) always make
sweeter party playlists. But if for some reason you really wanted a computer
that could out-think a brain, maybe you could build one…from…brains. Multiple
brains. Today, researchers at Duke University announced they have done nearly
that, wiring animal brains together so they could collaborate on simple tasks.
Network monkeys displayed motor skills, and networked rats performed
computations.
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Monkey Brains
Leading the
research was Miguel Nicolelis, a neurobiologist best-known of late for helping
a 29-year-old paraplegic man kick off the 2014 World Cup with a
brain-controlled exoskeleton. Nicolelis’ group has been wiring animal brains to
machines since 1999, when they connected a rat to a robot arm. But this is the
first time that anybody has directly wired together multiple brains to complete
a task—a so-called brain-to-brain interface.
To build the
monkey network, Nicolelis’ team first implanted electrodes in rhesus macaque
brains, positioned to pick up signals from a few hundred neurons. Then they
connected two or three of the macaques to a computer with a display showing a
CG monkey arm. The monkeys were supposed to control the arm, directing it
toward a target like a boat crew rows forward. When the monkeys got the arm to
hit the target, the researchers rewarded them with juice. (“Each monkey had
different juice preference,” says Nicolelis. “We had to do a preference test
beforehand.”) To be clear, the monkeys don’t think “move my arm” and the arm
moves—they learn what kind of thinking makes the arm move and keep doing
that—because monkeys love juice.
The rat
study was even weirder. For this one, the neuroscientists directly wired four
rats’ brains together—using the implants to both collect and transmit
information about neural activity—so one rat that responded to touch, for
example, could pass on their knowledge of that stimulus to another rat. Then
the researchers set the rats to a bunch of different abstract tasks—guessing
whether it might rain from temperature and air pressure data, for example, or
telling the difference between different kinds of touch-stimuli. The brain
collectives always did at least as well on those tests as an individual rat
would have, and sometimes even better. And in a successful effort to squidge
people out, the researchers called these rat-borg collectives “organic
computers” or, even worse, “brainets.”
That’s all
well and good and mad-sciency, but what is it actually good for? Plenty of
computer models predict the weather better than four networked rats. “Nobody
would do word processing or perform a Google search on an organic computer,”
Nicolelis says. But they might help accelerate rehab in people who have
neurological damage. Right now, relearning motor skills after a stroke or brain
injury is a long, painstaking process. Nicolelis wants to learn if a healthy
person’s brain could help a stroke patient re-learn how to move a paralyzed leg
faster than current therapies do.
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