You may think that if robots needed brains to learn, scientists would do everything possible to inhibit this, because it would unquestionably lead to a horrific future where mankind is tormented always by robotic zombies–the terror of which not even our goriest nightmares can concoct.  The artificial living dead would chug from village to village, killing all humans in their wake and harvesting our sweet, sweet neurons.

Well, University of Reading scientists are either incredibly short sighted or in cahoots with our mechanic oppressors, because they’ve recently decided to give a rat brain to a robot.  A robot with a freaking rat brain. So fortify your towns, populate them with Wall-E and Pleo, and throw up some Tesla coils at your defense towers.

The technology, though sinister, is quite fascinating.  The scientists are using 300,000 rat neurons to control a small robot in hopes that the project may shine light on the way memories are formed, and perhaps provide insight into diseases like Alzheimer’s.  The brain cells were taken from a rat fetus’s neural cortex and the connections between individual neurons were dissolved.  The robot itself is outfitted with sonar sensors, providing feedback to the neural blob, which then helps create new neural connections.

A temperature-controlled, electrode-sprinkled cabinet houses the rat brain, and the robot communicates with it via Bluetooth.  The robot has already learned to steer around obstacles, and the researchers hope that next it will be able to recognize its surroundings.  Then the creators plan to disrupt the memory connections that have been formed to emulate conditions of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.  How the neural tissue reacts to this will provide information for how memory-debilitating diseases are coped with by human neural networks.

Dr. Ben Whalley, a Reading neuroscientist who carried out tests on the robot, said one large question facing neuroscientists is how individual neuron activity affects the complex behavior of the entire neural network and of the organism.  “This project gives us a really useful and unique opportunity to look at something that may exhibit whole behaviours but still remains closely tied to the activity of individual neurons,” he said.

This research may provide a fuller understanding of memory-related diseases, but it will inevitably lead to robots who learn to be evil quickly and efficiently.  Why do you think the Scarecrow got a brain and the Tin Man did not?

[BBC]