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Microchips in the brains of two rats were connected to a computer network

04.03.2013

For the first time, American neurophysiologists were able to combine the brains of two rats into a "local network", the nodes of which can be separated from each other by a distance of thousands of kilometers, and force them to exchange information. This is stated in an article published in the journal Scientific Reports.

"Our previous work suggested that the nervous system is more flexible than we previously thought. In these experiments, the rat brain was able to easily adapt to new, unfamiliar "sensors" located outside the body. Thus, rodents learned to use an infrared camera as a new sense organ, so we wondered if the brain could "connect" to sense organs in another body," said Miguel Nicolelis of Duke University in Durham, USA.

To test this theory, Nicolelis and his colleagues connected dozens of electrodes to the movement center in the brains of two rats. Then the scientists connected their brains into a "local network" using a special cable that allowed the rats to exchange signals without disturbing the brain.

Scientists tested the operation of the neural "local network" by placing rats in a cage separated by a partition. In each half of the cage there were levers, the simultaneous pressing of which led to the dumping of treats into the feeders. The signal to use the levers was a small light bulb, present only in one of the rooms of the cage. Thus, the second rat could only learn about the light signal if it could extract information about it from the brain of the first animal.

The rats coped with the task - after a few days, the rodents learned to simultaneously press the lever, achieving success in 70% of attempts. This "local network" can also work over great distances - rats connected via the Internet were not inferior to their "colleagues". Nicolelis and his colleagues believe that this fact allows us to talk about the possibility of creating an "organic computer" - a large neural network of several independent brains.

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