In the lab, FinalSpark’s cellular biologist Dr Flora Brozzi handed me a dish containing several small white orbs.<\/p>\n
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 \u201corganoids\u201d. <\/p>\n
They are nowhere near the complexity of a human brain, but they have the same building blocks.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
What’s on display is a moving graph which looks a bit like an EEG.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“For AI, it’s always the same thing,” he said.<\/p>\n
“You give some input, you want some output that is used. <\/p>\n
\u201cFor instance, you give a picture of a cat, you want the output to say if it’s a cat”, he explained.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the lab, FinalSpark’s cellular biologist Dr Flora Brozzi handed me a dish containing several small white orbs.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":60635,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[241,61,60,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-60634","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-computing","8":"tag-computing","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60634"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60634\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}