In the lab, FinalSpark’s cellular biologist Dr Flora Brozzi handed me a dish containing several small white orbs.
Each little sphere is essentially a tiny, lab-grown mini-brain, made out of living stem cells which have been cultured to become clusters of neurons and supporting cells – these are the “organoids”.
They are nowhere near the complexity of a human brain, but they have the same building blocks.
After undergoing a process which can last several months, the organoids are ready to be attached to an electrode and then prompted to respond to simple keyboard commands.
This is a means for electrical signals to be sent and received, with the results recorded on a normal computer hooked up to the system.
It’s a simple test: you press a key which sends an electric signal through the electrodes, and if it works (it doesn’t always) you can just about see a little jump of activity on a screen in response.
What’s on display is a moving graph which looks a bit like an EEG.
I press the key a few times in quick succession, and the responses suddenly stop. Then there’s a short, distinctive burst of energy on the chart.
When I asked what happened, Dr Jordan said there was a lot they still don’t understand about what the organoids do and why. Perhaps I annoyed them.
Electrical stimulations are important first steps towards the team’s bigger goal of triggering learning in the biocomputer’s neurons so they can eventually adapt to perform tasks.
“For AI, it’s always the same thing,” he said.
“You give some input, you want some output that is used.
“For instance, you give a picture of a cat, you want the output to say if it’s a cat”, he explained.
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