How does our brain, which is capable of generating complex thoughts, actions and even self-reflection, grow out of essentially nothing? An experiment in tadpoles, in which an electronic implant was incorporated into a precursor of their brains at the earliest embryonic stage, may have edged us closer to answering this question.

Past attempts to peer into neurodevelopmental processes have relied on tools like functional magnetic resonance imaging or hard electrode wires stuck into the brain. But the imaging resolution was too low to be useful, while hard wires damaged the brain too much to offer anything other than a snapshot of a specific developmental moment.

Now, at Harvard University and his colleagues have identified a material – a type of perfluropolymer – whose softness and conformability matches that of brains. They used it to build a soft, stretchable mesh around ultrathin conductors that they then placed onto the neural plate – a flat, accessible structure that forms the neural tube, the precursor to the brain – of African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis) embryos.

As the neural plate folded and expanded, the ribbon-like mesh was subsumed into the growing brain, where it maintained its functionality while stretching and bending with the tissue. When the researchers wanted to measure brain signals, they wired up a part of the mesh sticking out of the skull to a computer, which displayed the neural activity.

The implant appeared to neither damage the brain nor elicit an immune response, and the embryos developed into tadpoles as expected. At least one went on to grow into a normal frog, says Liu.

“Integrating all the materials and having everything work is pretty amazing,” says at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania. “This is a great tool that could potentially advance fundamental neuroscience by allowing biologists to measure neural activity during development.”

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The team has two main takeaways from the experiment. First, the patterns of neural activity changed as expected as the tissue differentiated into specialised structures responsible for different functions. It has not previously been possible to track how a piece of tissue self-programs into a computational machine, says Liu.

Is the human brain really the most complex object in the universe?

There are 86 billion neurons in your brain, roughly the same number as there are galaxies in the observable universe. Whether the mind is more complex than the cosmos, however, is up for debate

A second mystery was how a regenerating animal’s brain activity changes after amputation. A long-standing idea was that the electrical activity returns to an earlier developmental state, which the team confirmed by using its implant in an experiment involving axolotls.

Liu’s team is now extending the research to include rodents. Unlike amphibians, their development takes place in a uterus, so implantation of the mesh will require in vitro fertilisation and a more complex way of measuring signal transmission than wiring the mesh up to a computer. However, Liu hopes that the insights that could eventually be gained from observing the earliest stages of conditions like autism and schizophrenia in animal models will be worth the effort.

Similar devices could potentially be used to monitor neuromuscular regeneration following injury repair and rehabilitation, says Bettinger. “Overall, this is an impressive tour de force that highlights the large potential breadth of applications for ultra-compliant electronics,” he says.

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Sandra Newman (Granta Books 19 October UK; 24 October US)

WHEN Julia first arrives in London, her mind must rearrange itself around her new life under the ubiquitous telescreens. “She’d started out feeling self-conscious and important, panicked by every careless word and proud of every Partyful comment.”

Fans of Nineteen Eighty-Four will have spotted the Newspeak of Oceania, the totalitarian state that surveilled its citizens’ every twitch in George Orwell’s novel. In the original, mononymous Julia was the love interest of a man fighting to preserve truth against the totalitarian impulse to make subjugated citizens agree that 2 + 2 = 5. But 75 years later, the Orwell estate all but anointed Sandra Newman as his successor. With its blessing, she wrote Julia.

In this new telling, Julia Worthing has a name and story of her own. Part of that story is to re-evaluate noble Winston Smith through her eyes. This book punctures the self-mythologising of a man who marches to his fate for a chance to preserve his ideals. Through Julia’s eyes, we see a self-regarding man-child in an overlarge revolutionary costume that gets him needlessly caught in the machinery of the Ministry of Love.

No one is spared in the reassessment. Newman shows how pompously men can assert high-minded ideals, even as they bend them into the service of far cannier objectives: the socialist ruling class who call themselves the Inner Party, Julia sees, never have wives over 30. “As soon as she starts to lose her looks, the wife becomes a thought-criminal.”

But cavilling that women have it harder isn’t the point of this book. It is more like cover for the deeper message. One level down from the obvious, Julia is a chilling examination of why, still, Orwell’s dystopia retains its resonance.

Totalitarian rule never starts that way. Julia’s mother recalls idealistic young men, before they figured out how lucrative socialism could be. “It wasn’t about Big Brother then, or any other particular man – that was rather the point, I thought,” she tells Julia. “But once they had power – well, then it was a throne and all fought for the throne.”

Julia’s unspeakable childhood has turned her into a scrappy, amoral survivor. After a life spent tap-dancing through a world of “keen-eyed informers”, and all those screens, “what was left was a set of habits, a personality that was a compendium of behaviours the watchers wanted to see”. Her instinct for who she needs to be for the screens is so precise, her performances almost convince herself. But new demands for ever more self-abasing demonstrations of fealty never stop coming.

Julia is a devastating read – it is no spoiler to say Nineteen Eighty-Four didn’t end well, and Julia’s experience is even worse for her cynicism: even the canniest player can only lose this game.

But Newman is so virtuosic, this book won’t let you put it down. This isn’t just because of her skill. There is never even the most fleeting impression you are rereading a story written last century. Screens watch us today too – now in numbers that far surpass the Inner Party’s – but the interests behind them are myriad and opaque. What will they want next? We can’t know, just as Julia’s mother didn’t know. All we know for certain is whatever comes next will retain a basic feature Orwell understood all too well. “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.”

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George Orwell (Penguin)
The book that shaped our understanding of nightmare futures and is claimed by everyone of every political persuasion as their own. Read it and join the Party!

Sally Adee is a technology and science writer based in London. Follow her on Twitter @sally_adee

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