I have spent the past 8 years at Caltech designing and improving devices to probe many neurons at a time. These include a multi-electrode array culture system in which the activity of a living network of a few thousand neurons is used to control the behavior of a computer-simulated animal (The Neurally Controlled Animat).

Sensory inputs are fed back to the network in real time, as patterns of electrical stimuli. We hope that by giving the cultured network a body to behave with, we can now study learning and memory in vitro, where we have unprecedented access to every cell in the net. This will allow us study collective neuron dynamics to a level of detail not feasible in living animals.

 

Steve M. Potter, PhD Senior Research Asst., Division of Biology, California Inst. of Technology and Assistant Professor, Biomedical Engineering Department, Georgia Inst. of Technology and Emory University.