X-Message-Number: 18682
From: "Peter Christiansen" <>
Subject: Current Issue PSYCHOLOGY TODAY
Date: Fri, 01 Mar 2002 14:18:09 -0600

X
In This Issue's Brain:
Artificial Intelligence: Inching Toward A The Merger of man and Machine

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.

By Stephen Totilo



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