So I'm Steve Potter.

I'm going to socially professor in
the department of biomedical engineering

at Georgia Tech and
Emory University School of Medicine.

This.

My lab is one of nine labs that
are part of the Laboratory for

neuro engineering in Georgia Tech
also called the neuro lab.

And I'm also a member of the I B B.

Our research is aimed at the basics
of learning and memory and

how information is processed in the brain.

I wrote my model brain here.

The.

So.

The kinds of questions that we're asking
are what changes about your brain when you

learn something.

What physically is a memory.

How is it that you remember and
store memories.

How do we forget memories.

Surprisingly little is known
about these processes.

In the year two thousand.

We created a new approach to studying
these questions called embodied

cultured networks.

We grow cultures of a few
thousand neurons and

cells on multi electro
the raids like this.

So these are the kind of cultures.

You can see here brain cells wiring up.

Those include neurons and glia this movie
takes place over the course of about one

week in culture and.

There's a culture dish
that I was holding up.

These dishes have about sixty electrodes
embedded in the substrate and

the neurons that are lying
near the electrodes.

Can be recorded and
we can also electrically stimulate them.

So we can form a two way
connection between a computer and

the neurons they're using these.

Multi electrode or a culture dishes.

So we created the hardware and the
software that we need to make the first

closed loop system between a multi
electrode array culture and a computer.

Here's an overview of the lab.

We have a culture dish sitting
here in the electronics.

Inside of a microscope and
the signals that are recorded by this

electronics are sent through these wires
to the computer and then the computer can

send stimulation commands back to
the culture so that's the closed loop.

You could think of the recordings as being
sensory information and the stimulation.

No you could think of the recordings
as being motor control information and

the stimulation as being
sensory information.

So we can feed information
into the cultures and

we can record information
out of the cultures.

We can also use that information that we
recorded to control a simulated animal on

the computer called an ad a mat or
we can use it to control the robot.

And we call those robots high brights
because they're hybrids of living neurons

and robotic artifacts in
one semi living system.

So for example in collaboration
with symbiotic in Perth Australia.

That's why we have this
Australia thing on our map here.

There's Perth.

They built this robotic arm that draws.

And we hooked it up to neurons in our lab.

So there it is drawing.

And this robot has traveled
all over the world.

My lucky former graduate student
Doug Bochum got to go to many different

exotic locales where it was exhibited and.

Controlled all the while by neurons in
our lab talking to it over the Internet.

There was also a video
camera that was filming

the drying process while it happens.

And that information would get sent
back to our lab and was translated into

electrical stimulation patterns
that were delivered to the network.

So again we have this
closed loop system in which

we're recording signals we're
controlling something with it.

It has a sensory system and that gets
translated back into stimulation.

That's delivered to the culture.

And.

So there's a closed loop system again.

Cultured networks have advantages for

studying learning in memory
compared to intact animals.

Probably the most important advantage is
that they're much less overwhelming in

their complexity than the human brain or
even then a rat brain or a mouse brain.

This has about ten trillion
neurons our cultures have about

ten thousand neurons so
few orders of magnitude.

They're simpler.

Most of the circuitry that makes
brains do what they do is missing from

our cultures but we believe that
a good fraction of the interesting

dynamics of culture of neural
networks are also present.

In the networks that we grow
in these culture dishes.

So the other big advantage that culture
networks have is that they're very

accessible to optical microscope P.
and other interventions that you might

want to do pouring on pharmacological
agents or electrically stimulating

that sort of thing is much easier to
do in vitro than it is to do in vivo.

So for example we built.

To photon microscope in the lab.

And we can use it to make these time lapse
movies of neurons forming connections.

So if you look carefully you might be able
to see some growth cones reaching out and

forming brand new.

A nap tic links between two neurons.

So we're hoping to use this technology.

It's such as to photon microscopy to watch
the learning process while it happens.

Cultured networks.

If you record their activity
they produce barrages

of activity called population bursts.

Here's an example of one of those.

So that is a population burst consisting
of thousands of action potentials that

the neurons have fired in the course
of about half a second or

so and it's this movie is
slowed down by a factor of ten.

So see if I can stop that.

These bursts resemble epileptic seizures.

And we develop techniques for
stimulating neural circuits in

culture using the multi electrode arrays
that they're growing on so we distribute.

Sprinkling of electrical
stimulation across the network and

that quiets down these bursts of activity.

So since we were successful in quieting
seizure like activity in our culture

dishes.

We've also begun
a collaboration with Bob Gross

who is a neurosurgeon at
Emory University School of Medicine.

To test out this idea as a potential
drug free treatment for epilepsy.

So we're hard at work first testing it out
in animal models and if that's successful.

We'll then move on to testing
it out in patients that have

intractable epilepsy and that project
was funded by the culture foundation.

So our closed loop systems allowed us

also to develop techniques to
train cultured networks were.

Electrical stimulation in this
light is an example of that.

If I can get it to go again.

So here we have an early control
an amount running around in a field.

And when the movie started it had already
learned to stay in the middle of the field

and then we confused it by reversing
the orientation of its sensory system.

And you can see that after a few minutes

it learns again how to move back to
the center of the field and to stay there.

So this is all thanks to multi
electro electrical stimulation

being delivered to a real live
cultured network in vitro.

So this technology has also allowed us to
uncover some previously unknown learning

mechanisms such as shifts in the dynamic
attractors expressed by these

networks these bursts and other activity
patterns can be looked at as attractors

in which the activity tends to flow down
certain circuits and we were able to

stimulate these cultures and cause the
activity to flow down different circuits.

It's thought that synopses play synapses
which are the connections between

neurons that they play an important
role in learning and memory and

the learning processes is thought
to be in much in many ways.

Thanks to changes in the strength of those
synapses we discovered that changes in

the propagation of these neural signals
down axons which are the tiny fibers that

make up nerves such as in
the in the brain stem there.

We discover that propagation of neural
signals down these tiny fibers called

axons is also involved in neural
plasticity propagation plasticity in X.

ons might be important nonce
a nap tick learning mechanism.

So this was made much easier to study by
the simplicity of our culture networks and

by the fact that we have sixty.

Electrodes through which we can
both stimulate and record them.

So our lab is a interdisciplinary lab.

Encompassing near.

Not just neurobiology but also a lot
of engineering electrical engineering

mechanical engineering software
engineering we do computer modeling

we do robotics we do optical
microscopy probably a few other things.

So I would say that we're one of the more

interdisciplinary labs in the department
in the spirit of the I B B.

You can learn a lot more about
the science and the technology that

we are working on by just googling
Steve Potter all of our papers can be

downloaded by going to
our publications page and

if you have questions of course
feel free to send me an email.

Thank you.