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The Guardian is reporting that the first (almost) fully formed human brain has been grown in a lab. Note, no paper or data has yet been published, but...
An almost fully-formed human brain has been grown in a lab for the first time, claim scientists from Ohio State University. The team behind the feat hope the brain could transform our understanding of neurological disease.
Though not conscious the miniature brain, which resembles that of a five-week-old foetus, could potentially be useful for scientists who want to study the progression of developmental diseases. It could also be used to test drugs for conditions such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, since the regions they affect are in place during an early stage of brain development.
Is it thinking?
The ethical concerns were non-existent, said Rene Anand of Ohio State University. "We don't have any sensory stimuli entering the brain. This brain is not thinking in any way."
Personally I'd like to see it hooked up to an fMRI just to check.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 20 2015, @07:20AM
In that sleep of unconscious sensory deprivation what dreams may come.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Friday August 21 2015, @12:46AM
Agreed. Even though the inputs may not be connected to anything, the processing elements remain.
Old-fashioned analog television and AM radios, when tuned between stations, still went about their business of trying to extract a signal and amplifying it. When it was on a TV, we called it 'snow' and on a radio it was 'static.'
A possibly apocryphal story, but I remember many years ago reading about a couple of Macintosh computers that had been set up near each other. Both were equipped with voice recognition and speech outputs. Some random environmental noise got one of them started and it 'heard' something. The other Mac, upon 'hearing' this, promptly conjured a reply which it 'spoke'. This was taken up by the first Mac as a verbal input to which it, too, responded. So, you had two computers talking to each other about absolutely nothing. They were doing the best they could to process their inputs.
Just because the inputs are not connected to anything, does not necessarily mean that no processing is going on. What form that processing may take at this point is entirely open to speculation. (As another commented, it would be interesting to see an fMRI of this brain.) I would assert that this is a very different situation from having inputs present but the processor not running at all.
A brain is a processor; if it's is not dead, then it is going to be doing something.
tl;dr: GIGO. [wikipedia.org]
Wit is intellect, dancing.