This from today’s Jerusalem Post. What’s particularly interesting is that were a biological computer a real possibility, this would vindicate the extended mind thesis.
Prof. Eshel Ben-Jacob of TAU’s faculty of exact sciences and his research assistant Dr. Itay Baruchi were chosen for their innovative work in brain research and their success in creating a memory- and information-processing neurochip made of living neurons.
Ben-Jacob and Baruchi have succeeded in creating for the first time a neurochip made of living neuron networks that stores memory and processes information. Their scientific achievement presents a conceptual breakthrough in approaching learning brain processes and paves the way for a technological revolution of building robots that integrate computers and neurochips. Their experiment comprised local nanometric injections of a certain chemical onto a neuronal network they grew in a dish, with the injection sites determined through real-time analysis of the network activity. The chemical stimulation evoked a new firing pattern, which repeated again and again as a persisting memory.
While some wonder if the brain is a fantastic computer, Ben-Jacob says it is not: “Computers have neither cognitive abilities nor the required plasticity – they are fixed.” To plasticize a “computer brain,” he hopes eventually to connect it to neural networks and create a biological computer that would be an evolvable system. Given a task, such a system would learn, evolve and improve itself via dialog between the computer and networks to perfect its task performance. The network will perform the cognitive part, of interaction with the environment, sound and picture recognition and decision-making. Baruchi thinks this is the key to technological advances such as handwriting recognition, on which Microsoft has been working intensively but with only partial success.
The ability to imprint memory templates in artificial networks of brain cells could yield a variety of technologies. The team believes that in the foreseeable future, it may be possible to treat neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. Later, Ben-Jacob believes, stem cells could be added to neural networks and adapted to specific functions by applying appropriate stimuli. Even further ahead, he hopes it will be possible to treat epilepsy by feeding the disordered brain activity to a biological computer, which will analyze it, identify the faults and feed corrected patterns of electrical stimuli back into the sick brain.
manwithoutqualities 