Scientists have shown that brain organoids can pass on signals corresponding to Braille letters, an essential step toward developing the energy-efficient biohybrid computers of the future. The organoids, remotely connected to a sensor that recorded tactile signals from different Braille letters, produced distinct signals for each letter, allowing a decoder to tell the letters apart.
Individual brain organoids provided accurately decodable signals 61% of the time. However, a team of three performed significantly better, producing an accurate signal 83% of the time. The team was also better at distinguishing signals from artificial noise than a decoder working directly on the obscured signals without the organoids' involvement.
The human brain is an incredibly energy-efficient computer, and silicon processors that try to imitate it achieve huge energy savings over traditional processors. Scientists are now experimenting with organoids modelled on the human forebrain to develop energy-efficient biohybrid computing. A crucial first step is learning whether organoids can receive and relay signals reliably, which a Bristol-based team investigated using Braille letters.
"We can take information from a real tactile sensor, turn it into a form that a living neural network can receive, and then recover meaningful information from the organoid response," said Tianyi Liu, a Ph D candidate at Bristol University and first author of the article in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. The researchers cannot yet explain why three organoids outperformed one, though individual variation may mean they complement each other.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing