This Lab Is Merging Human Brain Cells With Computer Chips

A research team in Australia is merging lab-grown human brain cells with silicon chips to try and create a computing system that can beat traditional hardware.

The so-called “DishBrain” system received(Opens in a new window) about US$400,000 in funding from an Australian national defense fund. If the brain-computer chip system succeeds, it could give the country a leg up in various AI fields, according to Associate Professor Adeel Razi at Monash University in Melbourne, who is leading the project. 

“This new technology capability in future may eventually surpass the performance of existing, purely silicon-based hardware,” Razi said in the funding announcement. 

The research comes from a partnership between a startup called Cortical Labs(Opens in a new window) and Monash University. By using a combination of rat and human stem cells, they’ve been growing around 800,000 brain cells on a silicon chip, “which has a set of pins that send electrical impulses into the neural structure, and receive impulses back in return,” Cortical Labs says.  

(Credit: Cortical Labs)

The computer chip can then be used to simulate the brain cells and read activity from them, turning BrainDish into a kind of biological CPU. Back in October, the team showed(Opens in a new window) that the technology can be programmed to carry out elementary tasks, including playing the game Pong.

Although the research is still in its infancy, the group sees potential in using the same approach to control more complex AI systems. In the announcement, the team hinted that BrainDish has more capacity at “lifelong learning” compared to traditional AI programs, which have stricter memory limits.

“We will be using this grant to develop better AI machines that replicate the learning capacity of these biological neural networks,” Razi added. “This will help us scale up the hardware and methods capacity to the point where they become a viable replacement for in silico computing.”