Our current primary means of communicating with computers, typing, is inelegant, to say the least. Some people never learn how to do it. Even those who are good at it must use a keyboard actually designed to slow typists down.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could just think at a computer? Or better yet, if a computer could do what we needed done without us having to think about it at all?
A lot of scientists think so, which is why there’s a lot of research going on into the possibilities of directly interfacing brain cells and computers.
In just the last few days, European researchers reported they have created an interface between mammalian neurons and silicon chips.
Working with German microchip company Infineon, the research team, a partnership known as NACHIP involving the Max Planck Institute in Munich, the University of Zurich and the University of Padua, placed 16,384 transistors and hundreds of capacitors on a one-square-millimetre chip.
Using special proteins found in the brain, they “glued” rat neurons to the chip. This both kept the neurons in place (neurons tend to wander) and helped transmit signals from the neurons to the transistors.
The electrical activity in neurons is the result of the movement of charged particles, specifically sodium ions, in and out of special pores. The neurons in the European experiment were genetically modified to have more pores than usual. As well, the neural glue helped ensure that extra sodium channels collected around the transistor and capacitor connectors. This made it easier for the transistors to detect the electrical activity in the cells and for the capacitors to alter the movement of sodium ions within the channels and thus cause the neurons to react.
With the transistors detecting cell activity and the capacitors stimulating it, a two-way communication circuit was established between the animate and the inanimate.
Previous work focused on snail neurons, which are larger and easier to work with. That work taught the researchers how to deal with some of the daunting challenges of interfacing neurons and silicon, most of which relate to the fact that they process information very differently. In a computer, for example, different functions usually take place in different places within the circuitry. In the brain, many functions are often carried out by the same piece of tissue. And if you cut away some neurons from the brain, other neurons will move in and take over their functions. Try that with a computer chip!
The successful creation of an interface between mammalian neurons and a computer chip is a major step forward in creating an interface that is actually useful. Years from now, it could lead to the creation of organic computers that use living neurons as their CPU—or silicon computers that use living neurons for data storage. It could make possible neural prostheses to combat various neurological disorders, giving sight to the blind or making possible prosthetic limbs that can be moved as naturally as real ones.
In the shorter term, it may provide us with more insight into how neurons form networks in our brains, and enable the development of special chips that would enable pharmaceutical companies to more easily and quickly test the efficacy of new drugs on neurons.
Of course (and don’t I wish I got a dollar every time I wrote or said this) more research is needed. The methods used for stimulating the neurons have to be refined; current methods too often damage them.
The researchers say it should be possible to the chip to signal a neuron to alter its membrane to allow it to take up the DNA for a new gene—or, alternatively, to accept a compound that switches off an existing gene. Turning genes on and off in specific neurons will thus be the next focus of the research team’s work.
The day may be coming when the lines between the brain and the computer, between the animate and the inanimate, blur to the point where it will be hard for those who are truly “plugged in” to distinguish between them.
I’m rather more intrigued than alarmed by the prospect, myself…as long as the computer I plug myself into isn’t using Windows. I’d hate for the last words I see to be “This brain has performed an illegal operation and must be shut down.”
