Early biocomputing — rats, robots, and flight simulators

12:51the um Georgia Tech, Georgia Institute of Technology. He developed this thing called a hybrid robot. He used cultured cortical neurons from rats on a multi-elerode array to actually do just to control like a robot. Okay. So again, this is a little plate that has a bunch of silicon electrodes. Let's say it could be something else. I don't actually know what what but today we use a lot of silicon in our electrodes obviously. Um, and he could grow rat cortical neurons on that electrode like in a petri dish and then sense and then write, you know. >> Mhm. >> So, you've got to read in and then uh

13:33write you can listen to what's happening and you can talk to it to tell it stuff. >> Yeah. Yeah. So, this this was him controlling a robot in 2004. This was in the news. That was pretty cool. Thomas de Mars cultured 25,000 rat cortical neurons in a petri dish and that acted as an autopilot for an F-22 flight simulator. >> This was all over the news as well back then. And so that's pretty cool, right? Like almost 20 years ago, more than 20 years ago, 30 years ago is when we're doing this stuff. So how come now is when we can actually play video games? Okay, the reason for that is one, we've had a huge

14:14improvement in how many electrodes we can fit inside our multi-elerode array. Back then we could only fit about 60. Now we can do thousands. So we can sense a lot finer detail. >> The the bandwidth is greater. >> Yeah. Yeah. It's like the density of the electrodes is literally greater. We can make them smaller. We can make them more sensitive. So we can now sense individual neurons rather than global populations. Uh the other thing is that we need to keep these neurons alive right in the petri dish. And we've had a tremendous amount of scientific innovation in how to keep neurons in a petri dish alive for an extended period of time. Right.

14:54>> Mhm. So now with all of that we can get to Cortical Labs which is a new startup that came out of Australia that is doing this stuff that is trying to make neurons in a pre-tradition play pong and now most recently play Doom but before that allegedly allegedly we'll see right we'll see >> before that we are we are just so grateful and excited for so many of you that continue to join us on this journey of curiosity and discovery. For those of you who are returning welcome back. We greatly appreciate your attendance at our multi-week now uh show release schedule. As we mentioned in our previous episodes, we are now testing

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