Did this guy grow a brain in the lab?

[YellowTail]

Cue mad scientist laugh. I can’t tell from reading the article whether the brain is actually learning on its own. Is it alive?

‘Brain’ in a dish flies flight simulator

[Padeye]

I can’t answer the medical question but the department of homeland security needs to put a stop to this research before the petri dish boards an airliner.

Ahem. The tissue culture is certainly alive in some respects. I’d really like to learn more about how the process works. How does the neuron culture know that it’s flying correctly? When it does a touch and go perfectly does the researcher spray it with a little atomizer full of endorphins? I doubt it has made the leap from being alive to being sentient.

[Roches]

Padeye: I think it’s quite the opposite. I think teaching a lump of tissue to fly planes would be a great way to get countless billions in grants. =) And it’s even an F-22 simulator. (A JSF simulator might’ve been even better, though.)

I can’t really make a call on whether it might be true without reading a scientific publication, but it seems very improbable. The article doesn’t mention a publication.

[Duck_Duck_Goose]

Oh, it’s true all right. The official UF press release.

How it works, sorta. The Media-Accessible Short Version.

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996573

Enzymes were used to extract neurons from the motor cortex of mature rat embryos and cells were then seeded onto a grid of gold electrodes patterned on a glass Petri dish. The cells grew microscopic interconnections,

< snip >

But until now, no one had written algorithms that harnessed neuronal responses to fly a plane.

< snip >

DeMarse’s array of 25,000 interconnected neurons were able to convert signals that indicated whether the simulated plane is experiencing stable conditions or hurricanes into a measurement of whether the plane is flying straight or tilted and then correct the flight path by transmitting signals to the airplane’s controls.

UF scientist: 'Brain' in a dish acts as autopilot, living computer

When DeMarse first puts the neurons in the dish, they look like little more than grains of sand sprinkled in water. However, individual neurons soon begin to extend microscopic lines toward each other, making connections that represent neural processes. “You see one extend a process, pull it back, extend it out – and it may do that a couple of times, just sampling who’s next to it, until over time the connectivity starts to establish itself,” he said. “(The brain is) getting its network to the point where it’s a live computation device.”

To control the simulated aircraft, the neurons first receive information from the computer about flight conditions: whether the plane is flying straight and level or is tilted to the left or to the right. The neurons then analyze the data and respond by sending signals to the plane’s controls. Those signals alter the flight path and new information is sent to the neurons, creating a feedback system.

“Initially when we hook up this brain to a flight simulator, it doesn’t know how to control the aircraft,” DeMarse said. “So you hook it up and the aircraft simply drifts randomly. And as the data comes in, it slowly modifies the (neural) network so over time, the network gradually learns to fly the aircraft.”

…The brain currently is able to control the pitch and roll of the simulated aircraft in weather conditions ranging from blue skies to stormy, hurricane-force winds…

[Larry_Mudd]

That’sfantastic, but I’m going to be seriously creeped out if it starts outputting “SURE SURE SURE SURE…”