Brain organoids grown in a lab have been developed that can perform basic computation tasks.
The work, conducted by Dr Feng Guo, assistant professor of intelligent systems engineering at Indiana University Bloomington, and his colleagues, is yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal.
The research has, however, been printed on bioRxiv, the preprint server for biology.
Organoids are minute, three-dimensional tissue cultures grown from stem cells. Dr Guo, and his colleagues, have grown brain organoids and linked them to computers and used them to solve mathematical equations.
The researchers believe that their work is an early step towards using living brain tissue as a form of artificial intelligence.
However, Martin Lellep, a physics PhD student at the University of Edinburgh told New Scientist 'It is an interesting approach but doesn't demonstrate real-world applications... The prediction is not incredibly impressive,'.
Previously, the chief scientific officer of Cortical Labs, Melbourne, Australia, Dr Brett Kagan, led a study that resulted in human and mouse brain cells grown in the lab learning to play the tennis-like videogame, Pong (see BioNews 1163). Dr Kagan used flat layers of human and mouse brain cells, whereas Dr Guo's team used three-dimensional brain organoids.
Now, Dr Kagan, is part of a collaborative programme to implement the vision of 'organoid intelligence', where the team of international scientists aim to replicate critical molecular and cellular aspects of learning and memory and possibly aspects of cognition in vitro. Recently publishing their ideas in Frontiers of Science.
Read more in Frontiers of Science article hub.
