Alain and team has developed synthetic neurons that respond to electrical signals from nerves in the same way as real neurons.This has huge potential for medical devices, like smart pacemakers.B ut interfacing our brains with computers has proven incredibly hard, despite the fact that both essentially run on electrical impulses.I n a p aper in Nature Communications, t he team say s th e devices could be plugged into biological neur al circuits to repair damage or disease.
Our work is paradigm-changing because it provides a robust method to reproduce the electrical properties of real neurons in minute detail. In other words, a signal twice as strong wont necessarily elicit a response thats twice as strong. T he first was from the hippocampus region of the brain, which is involved in learning and memory, and the second from the respiratory cente r, which controls breathing. They then used th at model to build analogue silicon chips that accurately modeled the behavior of real neurons. Each chip is roughly 0.1 millimeters in diameter, but many of them would need to be combined to create a practical implant, which would be a few millimeters wide. Their model doesnt cover the many branching dendrites that connect neurons to each other, and adding those dynamics might require further components.
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