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Medicine Games Science

Lab-Grown Brain Cells Play Video Game Pong (bbc.com) 44

Posted by BeauHD from the what-will-they-think-of-next dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Researchers have grown brain cells in a lab that have learned to play the 1970s tennis-like video game, Pong. They say their "mini-brain" can sense and respond to its environment. Writing in the journal Neuron, Dr Brett Kagan, of the company Cortical Labs, claims to have created the first ''sentient'' lab-grown brain in a dish. Other experts describe the work as ''exciting'' but say calling the brain cells sentient is going too far. "We could find no better term to describe the device,'' Dr Kagan says. ''It is able to take in information from an external source, process it and then respond to it in real time."

The research team: grew human brain cells grown from stem cells and some from mouse embryos to a collection of 800,000; connected this mini-brain to the video game via electrodes revealing which side the ball was on and how far from the paddle. In response, the cells produced electrical activity of their own. They expended less energy as the game continued. But when the ball passed a paddle and the game restarted with the ball at a random point, they expended more recalibrating to a new unpredictable situation. The mini-brain learned to play in five minutes. It often missed the ball -- but its success rate was well above random chance. Although, with no consciousness, it does not know it is playing Pong in the way a human player would, the researchers stress.

Dr Kagan hopes the technology might eventually be used to test treatments for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's. "When people look at tissues in a dish, at the moment they are seeing if there is activity or no activity. But the purpose of brain cells is to process information in real time," he says. "Tapping into their true function unlocks so many more research areas that can be explored in a comprehensive way." Next, Dr Kagan plans to test the impact alcohol has on the mini-brain's ability to play Pong. If it reacts in a similar way to a human brain, this would underscore just how effective the system might be as an experimental stand-in. As the "mini-brains" become more complex, Dr Kagan's team says they'll be working with bioethicists to ensure they do not accidentally create a conscious brain.

"We have to see this new technology very much like the nascent computer industry, when the first transistors were janky prototypes, not very reliable -- but after years of dedicated research, they led to huge technological marvels across the world," he says.
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Lab-Grown Brain Cells Play Video Game Pong More

Lab-Grown Brain Cells Play Video Game Pong

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  • We don't really know what consciousness is (Score:5, Interesting)

    by John Smith 2294 ( 5807072 ) on Wednesday October 12, 2022 @05:03PM (#62961283)
    We don't really know what consciousness is yet, so how can we avoid accidentally creating it? (unlikely, but not inconceivable)
    • Millions of people accidentally create consciousness every year. I'm sure we'll be fine.
      • Why not keep growing the cells until their number exceeds our natural brains? See if we can teach it to speak, so it can teach us things we havent thought of yet?
        • If we can teach it to speak... it can become a politician!
        • We are, just in a different substrate, the computer.

        • Why not keep growing the cells until their number exceeds our natural brains? See if we can teach it to speak, so it can teach us things we havent thought of yet?

          Yes, this will happen in the foreseeable future. Not centuries, probably not even decades from now. Time will tell the utility of artificial biological brains. The future of humanity will look entirely different if they are successful.

        • I think human-level intelligence involves more than just raw number of neurons. You need specialised areas. Whale brain has about twice [wikipedia.org] the number of neurons that humans do but whales don't appear to be more intelligent than humans.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      We don't really know what consciousness is yet, so how can we avoid accidentally creating it? (unlikely, but not inconceivable)

      Exactly. We have absolutely no idea what consciousness is. Currently known Physics does not even have a mechanism for it.

      • At the start, it is useful to divide the associated
        problems of consciousness into "hard" and "easy" problems. The easy problems of
        consciousness are those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive
        science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural
        mechanisms. The hard problems are those that seem to resist those methods.

        The easy problems of consciousness include those of explaining the following
        phenomena:
        - the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react

      • If you don't even know what it is how can you say there's no mechanism for it?

      • Currently known Physics does not even have a mechanism for it.

        Physicists can't explain dark matter either. So what?

  • "Sentient"? "Mini-brains"? This guy is a self-promoting clown.

  • So video games DON'T rot your brain...

  • good time to mention Starfish (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cats-paw ( 34890 ) on Wednesday October 12, 2022 @05:11PM (#62961309) Homepage

    by Peter Watts

    https://www.goodreads.com/book... [goodreads.com]

    Great book. The AIs in the book are wetware, clumps of brain cells which are used as AIs wherever you happen to need one.

    Wrote it many years ago based on research he had read about, excellent prognostication on his part.

    • In the manga Mahoromatic, which ran from '98 to '04 (and mentioned only tangentially in the anime) human brains.. kid's brains.. were disembodied by a shady organization called "Management" (which secretly rules the world from some island) and wired up to infrastructure, as bio-computers. These brains ran the elevators, the lights, the HVAC.. and even the toilets. While still sentient. >.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

      Yeah, it's a android maid rom-com.. sure.

      Disturbing, that people can even conceiv

    • A fantastic book, one of the few where the heroes of the novel are almost unpleasant, but with solid reasoning for them to be that way. I believe sequels have been written, but I've not tried to track them down.

  • "We could find no better term..." (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Caro Cogitatus ( 7226002 ) on Wednesday October 12, 2022 @05:44PM (#62961359)
    If you can't find a better term for a system that responds to outside stimuli, process it, and respond to it in real time than "sentient", then you're a moron.

    We had functional autopilots as early as 1912 [wikipedia.org]. In 1947 a USAF C-53 took off, flew across the Atlantic, and landed completely autonomously.

    And I don't think anyone is going to call a Tesla's responding-to-outside-stimuli-and-responding-in-real-time "sentient".
  • Who do these researchers think they are? Everybody knows that brain cells originally appeared by themselves without any outside help. How dare they say they were created! I'm triggered!
  • And win in a rout! Hit the showers, boys. They playfully snap each other with their axons in the locker room and the reporter gets the winning take: "We all are just happy to think and all the fans that give us the opportunity to win neigheye. Go Mini-brains!"

    "You heard it here first, folks. Mamma is going to be so proud."
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • So in the 90's, mini brains could fly a plane, but today, they can only play pong.

      Brain Cells are getting dumber.

  • I don't think the terminology being used here is accurate, with sentient and brain being used, but, what if it was.

    I can't help feel bad for this little under-powered being, trying its best to play pong but missing a lot of the time and just really struggling, because we couldn't make it any better with our current tech.

  • Grow a brain that is 10000x more neurons than a human brain, give it consciousness, inputs, outputs, and put it in charge of government.
    • The article doesn't seem to reference any kind of ethics apprehensions of any kind.

      Scientists have been putting human brains in jars and experimenting with them for five or so years now.

      Everyone is just fine with this ?
  • This is actually huge. I am amazed that they have this level of interaction with so little numbers of neurons.
    That hints that we really are missing something in how brains operate.

    • This is many more brain cells than some insects have (and they exhibit much more complex/interesting behavior).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      You can play pong with something like 100 transistors (including the "game-engine" itself, but not the screen). That is wayyyyy less than the complexity of a single brain cell.

  • Next up... management.

  • About as smart as me, then!

  • Dupe (Score:2)

    by dknj ( 441802 )

    This was already posted. Get it together, slashdot.

    https://science.slashdot.org/story/04/10/24/0024241/flying-by-brain [slashdot.org]

  • Concerned (Score:3)

    by Sqreater ( 895148 ) on Thursday October 13, 2022 @07:35AM (#62962321)
    If they have created a motivation to play Pong, then they have created a negative feedback signal when it does not play Pong. Same for hitting or missing the ball. In humans, we consciously perceive that negative feedback signal as physical or psychological pain at some level of intensity. The 800,000 cells would not be conscious of the feedback, but they would still feel it. Humans have consciousness of pain and our complex human motivation array creates many pathways to physical or psychological pain. The question arises: Is consciousness just feedback to a motivation array?

    • I was wondering the same thing . What's the feedback for learning ?

      However I think you may be wrong about pain. We don't have to beat babies to get them to play. Pleasure is the evident reward. And pain is different that the absence of pleasure. Indeed too much pleasure may not even be a goodthing

      • Yes, pleasure is when you satisfy the inborn motivation. Pain is when you do not. Pleasure and pain are the positive and negative feedbacks for satisfying or not satisfying the HMA (Human Motivation Array). Bio cybernetics, built in by billions of years of evolution. And an AI without a complex motivation array and feedback, negative and positive to that motivation array can never be self-aware.

  • Ah... I see we are ahead of schedule on the development of bio-neural gel packs [fandom.com].

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