An international team of scientists from the University of Sydney has shown that nanowire networks can exhibit both short-term and long-term protection like the human brain, Human intelligence can be physical.
The research was published in the journal Science Advances, by Dr. Directed by Alon Loeffler, who received his PhD at the School of Physics, and collaborators in Japan.
“In this study, we discovered that the higher cognitive functions, which we associate with the human brain, can be imitated in non-living things,” said Dr. Loeffler said.
“This work builds on our previous research in which we showed how nanotechnology can be used to create brain-based electrical devices that contain neural networks such as circuits and synapse signals.
“Our current work paves the way for the interpretation of the brain as a learning and memory in non-living systems and suggests that the nature of the brain as intelligence may be physical.”
Nanowire arrays are a type of nanotechnology that uses very small silver wires that are invisible to the naked eye, embedded in a plastic material, and scattered over each other. to mesh. The wires mimic part of the networked physical structure of the human brain.
Advances in nanowire networks could herald many real-world applications, such as improved robotics or detection devices that need to make quick decisions in unpredictable environments.
“This network of nanowires is like a synthetic nerve network because the nanowires make neurons, and where they connect to synapses,” said the author Professor Zdenka Kuncic, of the School of Physiology.
“Instead of implementing some kind of machine learning function, in this study Dr. Loeffler went further and tried to show that the nanowire network exhibits some kind of cognitive function.”
To test the strength of the nanowire network, the researchers gave it a test similar to the memory task commonly used in human psychology, called the N-Back task.
For humans, the N-Back task might involve recalling a cat from a series of feline images presented. The N-back score of 7, average for people, indicates that the person can recognize the same image appearing seven steps back.
When embedded in a nanowire network, researchers found that it could “remember” the end points required in an electrical circuit seven steps back, meaning a score of 7 on the N-Back test. .
“What we did here was to manipulate the end-electrode voltage to force the pathways to change, instead of letting the network do its thing. We forced the pathways to go where we wanted them to go,” Dr. Loeffler said. .
“When we did this, the memory had a very high accuracy and it didn’t degrade over time, which means we’ve found a way to make traffic more difficult to move them where we want them, the network. the body remembers it.
“Scientists think that this is how the brain works, some synaptic connections become stronger while others weaken, it is thought that this is how we remember certain things, how we how to learn, etc.”
The researchers said that when the network of nanowires is constantly stressed, it reaches a point where this support is no longer necessary because the information is integrated into the memory.
“It’s like a difference between long-term memory and short-term memory in our brain,” Professor Kuncic said.
“If we want to remember something for a long time, we have to keep training our brain to make it stronger, otherwise it weakens over time.
“One project showed that a nanowire array can store up to seven items in memory at a higher level than random without reinforcement training and near perfect accuracy with reinforcement training.”
Source: The University of Sydney
