The world's first robot controlled exclusively by living brain tissue

A 'Frankenrobot' with a biological brain

Meet Gordon, probably the world's first robot controlled exclusively
by living brain tissue.

Stitched together from cultured rat neurons, Gordon's primitive grey
matter was designed at the University of Reading by scientists who
unveiled the neuron-powered machine on Wednesday.

Their groundbreaking experiments explore the vani****ng boundary
between natural and artificial intelligence, and could shed light on
the fundamental building blocks of memory and learning, one of the
lead researchers told AFP.

"The purpose is to figure out how memories are actually stored in a
biological brain," said Kevin Warwick, a professor at the University
of Reading and one of the robot's principle architects.

Observing how the nerve cells cohere into a network as they fire off
electrical impulses, he said, may also help scientists combat
neurodegenerative diseases that attack the brain such as Alzheimer's
and Parkinson's.

"If we can understand some of the basics of what is going on in our
little model brain, it could have enormous medical spinoffs," he said.

Looking a bit like the garbage-compacting hero of the blockbuster
animation "Wall-E", Gordon has a brain composed of 50,000 to 100,000
active neurons.

Once removed from rat foetuses and disentangled from each other with
an enzyme bath, the specialised nerve cells are laid out in a nutrient-
rich medium across an eight-by-eight centimetre (five-by-five inch)
array of 60 electrodes.

This "multi-electrode array" (MEA) serves as the interface between
living tissue and machine, with the brain sending electrical impulses
to drive the wheels of the robots, and receiving impulses delivered by
sensors reacting to the environment.

Because the brain is living tissue, it must be housed in a special
temperature-controlled unit -- it communicates with its "body" via a
Bluetooth radio link.

The robot has no additional control from a human or computer.

From the very start, the neurons get busy. "Within about 24 hours,
they start sending out feelers to each other and making connections,"
said Warwick.

"Within a week we get some spontaneous firings and brain-like
activity" similar to what happens in a normal rat -- or human --
brain, he added.

But without external stimulation, the brain will wither and die within
a couple of months.

"Now we are looking at how best to teach it to behave in certain
ways," explained Warwick.

To some extent, Gordon learns by itself. When it hits a wall, for
example, it gets an electrical stimulation from the robot's sensors.
As it confronts similar situations, it learns by habit.

To help this process along, the researchers also use different
chemicals to reinforce or inhibit the neural pathways that light up
during particular actions.

Gordon, in fact, has multiple personalities -- several MEA "brains"
that the scientists can dock into the robot.

"It's quite funny -- you get differences between the brains," said
Warwick. "This one is a bit boisterous and active, while we know
another is not going to do what we want it to."

Mainly for ethical reasons, it is unlikely that researchers at Reading
or the handful of laboratories around the world exploring the same
terrain will be using human neurons any time soon in the same kind of
experiments.

But rats brain cells are not a bad stand-in: much of the difference
between rodent and human intelligence, speculates Warwick, could be
attributed to quantity not quality.

Rats brains are composed of about one million neurons, the specialised
cells that relay information across the brain via chemicals called
neurotransmitters.

Humans have 100 billion.

"This is a simplified version of what goes on in the human brain where
we can look -- and control -- the basic features in the way that we
want. In a human brain, you can't really do that," he said.

For colleague Ben Whalley, one of the fundamental questions facing
scientists today is how to link the activity of individual neurons
with the overwhelmingly complex behaviour of whole organisms.

"The project gives us a unique op****tunity to look at something which
may exhibit complex behaviours, but still remain closely tied to the
activity of individual neurons," he said.

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