16/08/08 When the story first broke on my iGoogle feeder I was amazed.....my brain went into overdrive.  I was imagining the first observed neural learning networks.  The consequences of the work would have been seminal.  In many ways it could have been viewed as a true robot/biological interface.  The work by the University of Reading

A multidisciplinary team at the University of Reading has developed a robot which is controlled by a biological brain formed from cultured neurons. This cutting edge research is the first step to examine how memories manifest themselves in the brain, and how a brain stores specific pieces of data. The key aim is that eventually this will lead to a better understanding of development and of diseases and disorders which affect the brain such as Alzheimer's Disease, Parkinson’s Disease, stoke and brain injury.

My excitement was profound.  I was going to get on here straight away and start blogging....but like everything in the new world of information feed.....nothing is at it first seems.  I waited, yes I know the old cynic in me, but there has been so much debate over in Sciencblogs about this new world of information sharing.  Unpublished, peer reviewed materials appearing and the science behind the stories doesn't add up.  Well I am glad I waited it out.  It seems that once again we have the potential of misinterpretation.  More than surprised that the actual story reached New Scientist and it was published.

Well on Neurophilosophy Steve Potter has left a comment that gives the claims more contextual understanding.

I am disappointed to see Kevin Warwick again overstating things, but am especially bothered when it is about things we are also doing in my lab. He said there's no computer in the loop which is clearly not true, and if you listen to Ben Whalley at the end of the interview, he even says the neural recording "...goes through fairly complex processing steps..." before it controls the robot. It has to. Robots and neural cultures don't speak the same language and something has to do the translation. The difficulty with this type of work (and the fun, sometimes) is that we can only make educated guesses at the neural "language" since we don't understand it yet.
I see nothing new here beyond what we and others (e.g. Sergio Martinoia and Suguru Kudoh) have been doing for the past 5 years. Believe what you read in peer reviewed papers.

Made me think.