Brain Cells in Lab Dish Keep Time
source: http://www.livescience.com/health/brain-cells-keep-time-100618.html
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"Brain cells don't need to be in your head in order to learn something, a new study suggests. The results show brain cells living in a lab dish can be taught to keep time.
The neurons, relocated from the outer layer of a rat brain to the inside of a lab dish, could fire for specific amounts of time depending on how they were trained.
The researchers used an electrical current to stimulate networks of cultured brain cells, similar to giving the cells an electric shock. While these networks contained tens of thousands of neurons, they make up only a small fraction of the 100 million or so neurons present in a rat brain. (The human brain contains about 100 billion neurons.)
"In a manner of speaking, those circuits could tell time in the range that they were stimulated with or trained with," said Dean Buonomano, professor of neurobiology and psychology at UCLA. "In other words if you needed to tell time, [to] tell 500 milliseconds, it would not really be possible to do that with the [brain] slices trained on 100 milliseconds, but it would be with brain slices trained with 500 milliseconds."
Scientists don't know whether this ability to tell time depends on a single part of the brain, a sort of centralized clock, or whether the function is more generalized, so networks of neurons throughout the brain are inherently capable of keeping time on their own without an orchestrator.
The results give weight to the latter hypothesis, since the segregated neurons could learn to keep time without tapping into a centralized brain area."
http://www.livescience.com/health/brain-cells-keep-time-100618.html
The neurons, relocated from the outer layer of a rat brain to the inside of a lab dish, could fire for specific amounts of time depending on how they were trained.
The researchers used an electrical current to stimulate networks of cultured brain cells, similar to giving the cells an electric shock. While these networks contained tens of thousands of neurons, they make up only a small fraction of the 100 million or so neurons present in a rat brain. (The human brain contains about 100 billion neurons.)
"In a manner of speaking, those circuits could tell time in the range that they were stimulated with or trained with," said Dean Buonomano, professor of neurobiology and psychology at UCLA. "In other words if you needed to tell time, [to] tell 500 milliseconds, it would not really be possible to do that with the [brain] slices trained on 100 milliseconds, but it would be with brain slices trained with 500 milliseconds."
Scientists don't know whether this ability to tell time depends on a single part of the brain, a sort of centralized clock, or whether the function is more generalized, so networks of neurons throughout the brain are inherently capable of keeping time on their own without an orchestrator.
The results give weight to the latter hypothesis, since the segregated neurons could learn to keep time without tapping into a centralized brain area."
http://www.livescience.com/health/brain-cells-keep-time-100618.html
