Faulty parts of living brains have been replaced by electronic chips, in an astonishing and controversial scientific breakthrough. It's a move that has been anticipated many times in science fiction, with creatures such as The Terminator, a 'cyborg' hybrid of flesh and machinery.
But now, researchers at Tel Aviv University have successfully created circuits that can replace motor functions - such as blinking - and implanted them into brains.
They hope the technology could in the future help people suffering from brain malfunctions such as Parkinson's disease - by replacing damaged or malfunctioning tissue with chips that perform the same function.
'Imagine there's a small area in the brain that is malfunctioning, and imagine that we understand the architecture of this damaged area,' said Professor Matti Mintz, a psychobiologist, speaking to the BBC.
'So we try to replicate this part of the brain with electronics.' Mintz has already successfully implanted a robotic cerebellum into the skull of a rodent with brain damage, restoring its capacity for movement.
In the video below, Prof Mintz discusses the ethics of developing a human 'memory chip' (BBC)
When wired to the brain, his 'robo-cerebellum' receives, interprets, and transmits sensory information from the brain stem, facilitating communication between the brain and the body.
To test this robotic interface between body and brain, the researchers taught a brain-damaged rat to blink whenever they sounded a particular tone. The rat could only perform the behaviour when its robotic cerebellum was functional.
According to the researcher, the chip is designed to mimic natural neuronal activity. 'It's a proof of the concept that we can record information from the brain, analyze it in a way similar to the biological network, and then return it to the brain,' says Prof. Mintz, who recently presented his research at the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence meeting in Cambridge, UK.
In the future, this robo-cerebellum could lead to electronic implants that replace damaged tissues in the human brain.
Science fiction helped the researchers come up with the idea of replicating a specific brain function with a microchip. The genre has long been populated by cyborgs and other related creatures, from Terminator and Robocop to Isaac Asimov's bionic robots and Blade Runner's bioengineered "replicants".
Although neuroscientists have quite literally been picking at the brain for decades, it is only recently that there have been significant breakthroughs in the area.
One instance is a brain-computer interface which allows a person with disabilities to control a computer cursor through the power of thought alone. It works via electrodes attached to their brain which read specific signals.
Prosthetic limbs function through brain implants, too, but they also only work one way, receiving signals and interpreting them into physical actions.
Getting the artificial portion of the cerebellum to receive one set of signals and send out an entirely different set of commands proved especially challenging. "The only way to for such a project to succeed is by combining different disciplines - and this is where 'nano-bio-info-cogno' comes in - uniting nanotechnology, biology, informatics and cognitive science," says Prof Mira Marcus-Kalish of Tel Aviv University, who is also taking part in the project.
"We take nanoelectrodes into a biology application, try to analyse everything through informatics, and then also use cognition."
The next step will be getting the rats to perform not just one, but several physical actions, says Prof Mintz.
"Let's imagine a person loses a big chunk of cerebellum, due to a haemorrhage, or a lesion, or due to ageing. Cerebellum ages very fast, and that's why we lose tiny motor functions," he says.
"So we need to find how to recover motor functions consistent of longer sequence of movements."
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"But think of the many people who have suffered brain damages because of accidents, of the people with degenerative diseases - the more replacement parts we have for our body, the more people are not just alive, but healthy.
"One philosophical question could arise once we'll be able to download a person's whole brain onto a chip and then implant the chip into someone else's body.
"This is a problem we don't yet know how to solve. But we're not there yet." says psychologist Prof Carlo Strenger from Tel Aviv University, who is not involved in the study.
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