{"id":93271,"date":"2019-07-08T08:43:23","date_gmt":"2019-07-08T15:43:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/07\/could-lab-grown-brains-develop-consciousness"},"modified":"2019-07-08T08:43:23","modified_gmt":"2019-07-08T15:43:23","slug":"could-lab-grown-brains-develop-consciousness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/07\/could-lab-grown-brains-develop-consciousness","title":{"rendered":"Could Lab-Grown Brains Develop Consciousness?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/could-lab-grown-brains-develop-consciousness2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s a very un-sexy view of consciousness: our rich, meaningful inner experience of <i>self<\/i> and <i>other<\/i> is nothing but electrical and chemical chattering inside our brains.<\/p>\n<p>If you, like many scientists, subscribe to this theory, then a difficult question naturally follows: at what point does electro-chemical activity in dissected brain-like tissue become conscious? Yes, I\u2019m talking about the classic sci-fi \u201cbrain in a vat\u201d scenario; no, we are <i>absolutely<\/i> not there.<\/p>\n<p>But this week, a Japan-led study in <i>Stem Cell Reports<\/i> is raising some serious red flags. For the first time, a team carefully characterized the electrical chattering of neurons grown from a brain organoid and found that they spontaneously formed long-distance connections that allowed them to fire in synchrony. \u201cFire together; wire together\u201d is a fundamental testament of learning in neuroscience. Because neurons in <a href=\"https:\/\/singularityhub.com\/2019\/06\/27\/scientists-can-now-clone-brain-organoids-heres-why-that-matters\/\">lab-grown minibrains<\/a> can sync up their activity, analogous to how neurons hook up in our brains, it\u2019s possible that the brain nuggets have the capability to support higher cognitive functions when they\u2019re more mature.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There\u2019s a very un-sexy view of consciousness: our rich, meaningful inner experience of self and other is nothing but electrical and chemical chattering inside our brains. If you, like many scientists, subscribe to this theory, then a difficult question naturally follows: at what point does electro-chemical activity in dissected brain-like tissue become conscious? Yes, I\u2019m [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":511,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-93271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/511"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93271\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}