Sandro Mussa-Ivaldi, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University Medical Center, has created a robot with the brains of a fish. Not impressed? Consider how he did it: He wired a two-wheeled robot directly into a lamprey's brain stem.
To control the robot, Mussa-Ivaldi co-opted the part of the lamprey's brain that normally works to keep the fish's body balanced. Light receptors on the robot sense the surroundings; then a computer translates that information into electrical impulses, which are fed into the lamprey's neurons. They interpret the impulses as they would if they were trying to keep the fish swimming upright. The computer then translates the cells' signals back into electrical commands instructing the robot how to turn its wheels in response to a light. Neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis at Duke University and his colleagues have achieved similar success with owl monkeys. A computer program reads electrical patterns in the monkeys' brains and ...
