No doubt you’ve all heard about the brain in a vat theory in which scientists ponder
the scenario of us not being connected to our bodies.
In this thought experiment we are merely brains, suspended in some kind of life-sustaining
liquid and connected to a super-computer that gives us consciousness.
If the computer tricks the brain in a vat into thinking it’s walking around, is it
really walking around?
What difference is there between believing something is happening and having it happen
in some kind of objective reality?
What even is an objective reality?
We could easily spend a whole episode on just this question, but ignoring the philosophical
questions, what if we told you that scientists have created a brain without a body, and it
functions?
To understand how this happened first we need to understand something called organoids.
These are 3D organ models that are grown in a lab.
They are basically mini organs that mimic how our organs work.
If that can be done, it has wide implications for biological research.
We can use them to model diseases, for gene editing, for transplantations and of course
so scientists can just study the organoid and how it functions.
So, you’d think one of the best things to recreate would be a brain.
That’s something we’d like to study and unfortunately scientists have always had a
hard time trying to understand exactly how the living brain works because you can’t
exactly open up the hood of living patients and start prodding around.
This is one of the setbacks when scientists try and understand consciousness, something
that has been a mystery in some part since we had brain experts.
You should be proud; your brain is one very complicated and amazing piece of organic machinery.
Well, most of them anyways.
Making a living brain would be a massive scientific breakthrough.
And it’s already been done, if you believe a paper published in a journal called Cell
Stem Cell that is.
This paper isn’t exactly easy to understand, so we’ll give you an excerpt from the paper
and then attempt to tell you what happened in layman's terms.
Here is the snippet:
“We developed human cortical organoids that dynamically change cellular populations during
maturation and exhibited consistent increases in electrical activity over the span of several
months.
The spontaneous network formation displayed periodic and regular oscillatory events that
were dependent on glutamatergic and GABAergic signaling.
The oscillatory activity transitioned to more spatiotemporally irregular patterns, and synchronous
network events resembled features similar to those observed in preterm human electroencephalography.”
Did you get all that?
Yeah, we thought so, it’s not the kind of thing you’d spill your coffee over trying
to be the first to tweet out to all of your friends.
People generally don’t get really excited when they hear about “glutamatergic and
GABAergic signaling.”
Thankfully the media talked to these scientists and they explained what happened in terms
the average non-brain-scientist human can understand.
What the scientists say they actually did was create organoids of a brain.
Remember those are the smaller versions of regular organs.
And this one was A LOT smaller.
In fact, it’s about one million times smaller than your brain.
Even if your IQ is on the low side, your brain is an ultra advanced super computer compared
to what they created.
Saying that, it’s still really special because in their 3-D brain they recreated electrical
waves, what we call brainwaves.
These tiny things in some part functioned just like our bigger brains.
They grew the small brains by putting pluripotent stem cells, basically a type of cell that
can grow into all different types of cells, into an environment that resembled the conditions
in which the brain would normally grow.
As you know from that difficult-to-understand paper, after a few months these things started
to mature.
What happened was those cells got together and grew, and they grew into brain cells and
in the end they grew into something much like the full organ, just very, very small.
And this wasn’t a one time success, they actually created hundreds of them.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
While this breakthrough is big, it doesn’t mean we had a bunch of tiny brains that could
experience consciousness.
They weren’t looking down on a petri dish thinking I’ve just seen God and he wears
a white jacket and glasses, or, “hmm, I think therefore I am.”
Nope.
This brain was utterly senseless, but it did show activity.
This is mega-important because those scientists are now thinking that with these organoids
they can work on better understanding how the brain functions, in sickness and in health.
Newsweek writes that they are hopeful that down the line these tiny bits of brain might
help scientists find a cure for all kinds of neurological disorders including schizophrenia,
autism, and epilepsy.
If the brain ends up wired in the wrong way, maybe that faulty wiring can be fixed.
One of the co-authors of the study who does her work at the University of California said
this about her team’s achievement, “You can use brain organoids for several things,
including to understand normal human neurodevelopment, disease modeling, brain evolution, drug screening,
and even to inform artificial intelligence.”
Another very cool thing the scientists did was create an algorithm based on the brain
pattern of 39 womb-bound fetuses aged between six and nine and a half months old.
First they were able to detect the brainwaves in the developing fetuses.
They then used the algorithm to look at their brain organoids and it showed that their creation
was growing like the naturally developing brains.
This is the first time it’s ever been done, because while in the past scientists have
created mini-brains they didn’t have functioning neural networks.
Now scientists are mimicking how the brain really grows, and are of course very excited.
But will they develop something almost human, like the famous brain in a vat?
Could science make these things conscious down the line?
One of the researchers answered like this:
“The organoid is still a very rudimentary model—we don't have other brain parts and
structures.
So these brain waves might not have anything to do with activities in real brains.”
Ok, we can stop fantasizing then.
These body-less brains won’t be hitting you up on social networks or binge-watching
Friends.
Nor will they be put into metal bodies and hang out in a vault under a hotel until one
of them commits murder.
Oh, but hang on, because researchers also said this:
“It might be that in the future, we will get something that is really close to the
signals in human brains that control behaviors, thoughts, or memory.
But I don't think we have any evidence right now to say we have any of those.”
She went on to say that what they all hope is that one day soon they’ll have these
advanced brain models and be able to use them to study disease and in turn give people with
brain disease a better quality of life.
She said you also have to think about the matter of ethics.
If you are creating something close to a human then you must treat it with respect.
If these brains start dreaming of electric sheep then what has been created?
But we are a while away from making a brain that can think.
Still, it’s big news among the scientific community.
What do you think about it?
Are you excited?
Would a brain in a jar be a human?
Tell us in the comments.
Also, be sure to check out our other video Why Would a Scientist Inject Himself with
3.5 Million Year Old Bacteria?
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.