Item — HN Reader

I found the title misleading, but it may have something to do with my previous knowledge of experiments in which cultured rat neurons are placed on an array of electrodes and trained to power a robot. I had hoped this story was about a physical worm's brain being transplanted into a robot. It is still an amazing test of the OpenWorm project's findings.

Here is a link to some info on Hybrots:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrot

2 comments

> I had hoped this story was about a physical worm's brain being transplanted into a robot.

isn't that so much less interesting with respect to technology, biology, and philosophy? isn't putting a biological brain into a robot just an exercise in mapping inputs and outputs? we have already done this with human prosthetics.

how the brain communicates with other parts of your body is not much of a mystery.

synthesizing a brain in software seems so much more profound. not only is it a tool for helping understand the brain itself, but more importantly, consciousness.

My initial though was actually that they had a working model of the brain, put neurons in a setup that mimicked the same inputs and outputs, and the neurons arranged in the same configuration as the model. A real life proof of concept of their model. Would be awesome.

"... cultured rat neurons are placed on an array of electrodes and trained to power a robot..."

Wait what. That's sounds amazing. Are they still working on this?