As scientists continue to make advances using human tissue to grow brains in laboratories, one neuroscientist is naming the existential elephant in the room: could lab-grown brains ever become truly conscious?
In an interview with Live Science, University of California at Santa Barbara neuroscientist Kenneth Kosik explained that as the science stands now, the facsimile brains made in labs aren't likely to achieve consciousness anytime soon.
These brain organoids, as the lab-grown brains are called, are created by taking someone's cells, converting them into stem cells, and differentiating those into neurons.
Because of some incredible "magic" achieved within neurons submerged into drops of a substance called "Matrigel," which as Kosik noted can be either a liquid or solid depending on temperature, the neurons from these stem cells blossom out into three dimensions rather than just two. Those tiny brain-esque structures eventually develop tissues similar to those in brains and begin emitting electrical signals. But as the neuroscientist insists, it's a misnomer to refer to the organoids as "minibrains," as his fellow researchers often do.
"Once they're growing in three dimensions, they start to form relationships to each other, kinds of structure and anatomy, that has a very loose resemblance to the brain," he told Live Science. "And I really emphasize the word 'loose,' because there are people that use a misnomer for brain organoids and call them "minibrains."
In a recent perspective article published in the journal Cell, Kosik argues that despite bearing "an uncanny resemblance to a miniaturized brain," these organoids are far from sophisticated enough to achieve the hallmarks of consciousness.
While there have been some incredible advances in so-called "biocomputing" using connected brain organoids that act as processes, it remains unclear whether experimental brain organoids could store or process information the way our human brains can — and scientists would also have to figure out how to transmit human-level information to them to make that happen, too.
"The way I look at an organoid, it is a vehicle that has the capacity to encode experience and information if that experience were available to it — but it's not. It has no eyes, ears, nose or mouth — nothing's coming in," Kosik told Live Science. "But the insight here is that the organoid can set up spontaneous organization of its neurons so that it has the capacity to encode information, when and if it becomes available."
More on fake brains: Scientists Connect 16 Mini Brains Made of Human Tissue to Create a "Living Computer"