What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System - NeurIPS 2018

Presented December 4th 2018 by Prof. Michael Levin (Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University)

Michael Levin
Vannevar Bush Professor
Director, Allen Discovery Center at Tufts
Director, Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology
Morphological and behavioral information processing in living systems

[GuillermoValleCosmos]

Summary:
Bodies have bioelectrical patterns that store information "memories" separately from genomic, anatomical states. These bioelectrical patterns play a huge role in developmental processes, so that being able to control them is basically like a holy grail of regenerative medicine. It also offers interesting new insights for AI and cognition.

Detailed notes:

2:55 memories are preserved in metamorphosis/regeneration.
5:16 unicelular creatures "think"
9:00 planarian can be cut into pieces and each will regrow to the correct full organism! Each piece knows about the whole (a bit like a hologram!), and can do collective decision-making to guide themselves to the correct structure (important to know when to stop 8:41).
9:21 planarians have conquered aging! (new favourite animal here)
10:00 further examples of pattern homeostasis (keeping its shape, robustly, to the programmed shape)
14:40 biology is dealing with hardware right now; can we move to dealing with software?
16:26 bioelectric mechanisms in brainn come from ancient mechanisms found in cells through the body
20:00 seeing cancer via electrical signal anomaly
20:20 how to control these bioelectric processes
22:20 editing the morphology of organisms, without changing the genome, just by interacting with the developmental processes! wow!
24:07 computational modeling
24:30 altering pattern memory. Wow, an electrical memory that holds information, separately from anatomy and genome!
27:34 extending connectionist models to understand this. Stable attractors (like Hopfield nets!)
28:31 applications in *regenerative medicine*. Making frogs regrow their legs!
29:20 and reversing birth defects. Hmm, it's really cool that you can bypass genomics, but this patterning only affects anatomy right? If a gene generating some protein essential for some biochemical pathway is missing, you can't fix it with bioelectrics right? See comments at 40:27 But still the applications seem awesome
30:50. The endgame. A biological compiler to design organisms. As Freeman Dyson wrote: "a new generation of artists will be writing, composing genomes with the fluency that Blake and Byron wrote verses"
31:40. The future. a highly-robust ML technology, based on non-neural architectures. I can smell our friend Physarum polycepharum appearing soon :P (didn't but would have been cool)
32:52 "non-neural networks" lol. Robot scientist lol.
33:36 Thank
Q&A
34:36 difference between behavioural and anatomical electrical patterns, and how to control the anatomical ones. Anatomy at low frequencies, behavior at high frequncies; they are pretty well-separated.
37:18 best approach to create truly intelligent systems
39:30 what about plants, and mechanical signaling. Plants independently evolved bioelectric control. Mechanical forces interact with electrical effects (and also with genetics ofcourse). Key question: "at what point in that control structure is it most efficient to intervene" (to me the hardware-software divide is just about identifying the parts of a system that are more suitable for control
41:56 Consciousness.
44:12 Timescale of control signals. Very short interventions, as you are basically just rewriting the electrical memory :)
46:22 non-neural nets
48:23 Ethical concerns
49:42 relations to signal transduction networks and systems biology models
50:51 relation to reaction-diffusion models

[PnrmA]

Best talk I have ever seen in my life as a biochemist/immunologist. Mindblowing!

[yzyzyz]

And once again I think Tesla was spot on with his quote “ If you wish to understand the Universe think of energy, frequency and vibration. “ Thanks for this amazing presentation!

[themfu]

Holy smoke! This video is packed with amazing facts and stupendous possibilities.

[zpaulocarraca]

Brilliant presentation, by a humble genius. Michael Levin was (~49min) anticipating problems with gene editing and chimeric viruses, back in 2018. Spot on.

[georget]

definetly one of the best scientific talks I've seen online, absolutely

[desireco]

Wow. Mind blown. Trully something new and innovative. Can't wait to see where it will head.

[The-Singularity-M]

Absolutely brilliant biological research. Novel, Provocative, and Cutting edge are the words that spring to mind! I belive nobel prize worthy!

[meritoracy]

This lab (and talk) will one day be in science history books. Well done. Nobel countdown begins.

[superduck]

My vocabulary of bad words isn’t big enough to express how freakin mindblown I am after this.

[lepermunna]

Some of the most incredible and surprising research I've ever seen. Title seriously understates the significance of the results. Keep it up guys!

[WillemAsselbergs]

Thanks for sharing. Brilliant work.
I'm a biologist in computer science, and clearly your talk resonates at many levels on my end.
The mapping, understanding and most importantly modelling + simulation (=forcasting) of the different aspects and structures is key.
Your decisions, flow of the experiments, and subsequent deductions are truly excellent.
You've pushed the boundaries. Shifting what we know, and can anticipate.
It'll be interesting to do this through simulations.
At the detailed level. Mapping your software over underlying logical (=independent) entities.
The overall structure should shape, create, and morph the functions of the cell dynamics.
It'll speed up development, and will point to new logical components (at the electrical and molecular level).
I'll be following this kind of work more attentively.
This is the future!

[FighterFred]

As a heart transplant patient, please check into 1. regeneration of a new heart using stored pattern info, 2. fix the rejection issue, so that transplanted organs work as normal in their new environment. Amazing talk, thanks.

[JirkaVrany]

This is really amazing, my mind just blows up. Thanks for sharing.

[carlossegura]

This really amazing content. I have watched it 3 times already

[prof.m.ottozeeejcdecs]

This is not my discipline, BUT what this man and his group is working on is the holy grail of LIFE in the universe. WOW!

[UNDRCULT]

Brilliant research with huge future impact.

[InnerNetNews]

Thanks for posting this, it was a great watch!

[pepe]

this has got to be nobel prize material

[beincheekym]

incredible talk, thank you so much for sharing, and thank you to Michael Levin to present this work to a widely new audience for him. this is the kind of collaboration we want to see. of course i realize most of these ideas are still very immature in how to create machine learning algorithms inspired from them. but i hope his lab attracts the few scientists that will help bridging that gap. and who knows maybe i'll even apply one day! man i am so excited i have to punch a wall.