Brain cells in a dish learnt to play Pong
In a feat that reads like the plot of a science fiction movie, scientists have been able to get a collection of brain cells living in a dish to play a video game.
The team were able to prove that their collection of 800,000 neurons, which they call DishBrain, could perform goal-directed tasks, including playing the popular tennis-like game Pong.
To create DishBrain, they took brain cells from mouse embryos, along with some human brain cells created from stem cells, and grew them on top of microelectrode arrays.
These arrays are capable of both reading the signals these cells produce and stimulating the cells - allowing them to play a cheeky game of Pong.
Electrodes on the left and right of the array told the cells which side the ball was on, while the frequency of signals told them how far the ball was from the paddle.
“The beautiful and pioneering aspect of this work rests on equipping the neurons with sensations — the feedback — and crucially the ability to act on their world,” says co-author Professor Karl Friston, a theoretical neuroscientist at UCL, London.
“Remarkably, the cultures learned how to make their world more predictable by acting upon it. This is remarkable because you cannot teach this kind of self-organisation; simply because — unlike a pet — these mini brains have no sense of reward and punishment."
Having published their findings in the journal Neuron, they now plan to find out what happens when they give DishBrain medicines and alcohol.
“We’re trying to create a dose response curve with ethanol – basically get them ‘drunk’ and see if they play the game more poorly, just as when people drink,” lead author Dr Brett Kagan, the Chief Scientific Officer of the biotech start-up Cortical Labs, says.
Because DishBrain was built using basic structures, rather than being modelled on AI, it can be used to understand how our brains function.
“In the past, models of the brain have been developed according to how computer scientists think the brain might work,” Kagan explains.
“That is usually based on our current understanding of information technology, such as silicon computing.
“But in truth we don’t really understand how the brain works.”
DishBrain viewed under a microscope, where fluorescent markers show different kinds of cells. Where multiple markers appear, the colours merge and look yellow or pink. Image: Cortical Labs
Dr Adeel Razi, the Director of Monash University’s Computational & Systems Neuroscience Laboratory, says this experiment could open the door for more discoveries.
“This new capacity to teach cell cultures to perform a task in which they exhibit sentience – by controlling the paddle to return the ball via sensing – opens up new discovery possibilities which will have far-reaching consequences for technology, health, and society,” he says.
“We know our brains have the evolutionary advantage of being tuned over hundreds of millions of years for survival.
"Now, it seems we have in our grasp where we can harness this incredibly powerful and cheap biological intelligence.”
The creation of DishBrain also creates the possibility for an alternative to animal testing for scientists investigating how new drugs work and gain insights into how conditions such as epilepsy and dementia affect our brains.
“This is brand new, virgin territory. And we want more people to come on board and collaborate with this, to use the system that we’ve built to further explore this new area of science,” Dr Hon Weng Chong, Chief Executive Officer of Cortical Labs, says.
“As one of our collaborators said, it's not every day that you wake up and you can create a new field of science.”
Images: Cortical Labs / Flickr