Inching toward the merger of man and machine

Focuses on a study which combined brain neurons and microchips. Benefits of the study.

By Stephen Totilo, published on January 01, 2002

Computer chips embedded in the human brain may someday combat memory loss and help scientists understand how memories are created. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Munich, Germany, have combined snail neurons and microchips in the first biomechanical connection between a network of living brain cells and a silicon chip. The study was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

While the German scientists caution that "the combination of microelectronics and circuits with nerve cells has a touch of science fiction," they indicate that their work may pave the way for a chip that can monitor--or even control--associative memory.

Brain cells and microchips both conduct information via electrical charges. German researchers successfully married the two by extracting live neurons from snails and "blowing" them onto a silicon chip. The cells and transistors were lined up so that a charge flowed from the chip to one cell, then to a second, then back into the chip. Lead researcher Peter Fromherz, Ph.D., began this endeavor in 1985 and says it took a decade for the first silicon-to-neuron junction to be made.

Terrence Sejnowski, an expert in computational neurobiology at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, conjectures that "these experiments might someday lead to a 'brain in a dish,' whereby sensory input and motor output are all controlled by a computer." For now, research continues at a slow but steady snail's pace.