They LIVE!

[freydis]

Rise of the rat-brained robots!

Excerpt:

This is no ordinary robot control system - a plain old microchip connected to a circuit board. Instead, the controller nestles inside a small pot containing a pink broth of nutrients and antibiotics. Inside that pot, some 300,000 rat neurons have made - and continue to make - connections with each other.

As they do so, the disembodied neurons are communicating, sending electrical signals to one another just as they do in a living creature. We know this because the network of neurons is connected at the base of the pot to 80 electrodes, and the voltages sparked by the neurons are displayed on a computer screen.

[Homicidalheathen]

This parts the best...as it deals with why the brain does what it does...deep in the cells the blueprint for action is there.

There are various views on what these bursts are. Some see them as pathological activity - akin to what happens in epilepsy - while others see them as the neural network expressing a stored memory. "I interpret them as seizure-like behaviour," says Potter. "I think the bursting is a function of sensory deprivation."

Like a creature with no limbs or senses, the cut-down brain is simply bursting out of boredom, says Whalley. "With no structured sensory input the hypothesis is that you get arbitrarily random and quite often detrimental activity because all these cells are asking for some kind of direction