Grain sized brains

It sounds a lot like the kind of thing you would entertain on a flight of fancy, but don’t think that this news is a step too far or that you’ve waked straight into a twisted April Fools prank. Canadian scientists have managed to bridge a gap between fiction and reality by successfully melding human brain cells and that ultimate symbol of artificial intelligence, the silicon chip as they attempt to tune in to and understand more about the manner in which the neurons communicate. Don’t be alarmed though, a Terminator isn’t going to be coming after you any time soon.

It’s a micro-chip sized brain, and the medical advances it promises are staggering. It’ll help scientists understand how brain cells perform and go about their task in the normal way of functioning and thus record their activities and abnormalities which will help new drug discoveries for a number of neurological diseases including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. In medical jargon, ion channels and synaptic pathways will be monitored and these chips will be fully automated, doing away with the laborious training needed to be able to track and account for ion channel activity within brain cells. With this one step, several cells can be placed on a single chip and screening on a previously impossible scale is now possible for multiple dysfunctions.

The news is a huge fillip for biomedical engineering as it means testing for a number of medical interventions can be sped up many times over in a manner that is more accurate and efficient. This medley of the organic and artificial is a huge step up for the research team based in Calgary that previously used Snails cellular neurons that were several times larger than that present in humans. This is perhaps the first step towards a bionic hybrid and it represents a massive step in medicinal interventions. Previous iterations of this biochip allowed researchers to listen in, but not wholly which left scientists with a limited understanding of the electrical impulses that were pinging back and forth.

Inside your cranium, a complex cocktail of the chemical and electrical is used to relay messages from one neuron to another and this eventually manifests itself in your state of being, be it relaxed or agitated. And the ion channel these researchers are now monitoring is the big daddy of all the pathways. It puts the human brain under the microscope like never before and it gives artificial intelligence a whole new meaning.

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