Self-Organizing Units Lab
Engineering brains, minds, and
consciousness
Biocomputing
Consciousness
Cybernetic Agents
Engineering brains, minds,
and consciousness
For billions of years, living systems have gradually developed strategies to overcome challenges within their environments. Today, we draw inspiration from these natural innovations to develop synthetic tissues, organs, and organisms. Tissue engineers play the role of biological architects, sculpting new living structures from biomaterials and cells to model features of our bodies in a dish. At the SOUL, Dr. Rouleau and his team are using tissue engineering and brain-machine interfaces to create and study agential cybernetic organisms (cyborgs) with customizable nervous systems to understand thought, goal-directed behaviour, and consciousness.
What is the SOUL?
The Self-Organizing Units Lab (SOUL) is an incubator for scientific ideas related to brains, minds, agency, consciousness, and biocomputing. Ultimately, we aim to engineer minds.
Consciousness engineering
Closed-loop feedback
Cybernetic agents
Research Themes
Detecting Unconventional Minds
Humans suffer from a pervasive "mind blindness" - an inability to detect minds in unconventional embodiments. We are using brain-machine interfacing and developing theoretical frameworks centered on substrate-independent and multiply realizable models of consciousness to help positively identify minds wherever they reside. We are deeply interested in quantifying the internal causal structures of potentially sentient systems.
Building Minimal Subjects and Agents
Cognitive systems harness computational resources to solve problems in the real world. What are the fundamental mechanisms that give rise to intelligence? What are the necessary and sufficient elements needed for consciounsess? Do brain tissues in petri dishes display agential behaviour? Our goal is to design platforms to assess minimal cognition in vitro and build minds in a dish. We embody cultured neural networks to assess minimal requirements of agency and consciousness in cybernetic systems.
Modeling Neural Injury and Disease
Traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) and neurodegenerative states such as Alzheimer's Disease (AD) are major sources of suffering worldwide. We use bioengineered brain models to understand their mechanisms and screen therapies to enhance translational medicine. Minimal models of disease minimize complexity while preserving physiological relevance - cutting through the noise to shine a light on the proximate and ultimate causes of disease.
Lab Members
We are neuroscientists, philosophers of mind and action, electrophysiologists, and bioengineers with a passion for discovery.
The Rouleau Lab (SOUL) is part of the Center for Tissue Plasticity and Biophysics (TPAB) at Laurier, which is co-directed by Dr. Nirosha J. Murugan and Dr. Nicolas Rouleau.
Dr. Nicolas Rouleau - Principal Investigator
Dr. Jesse St. Jean - Post-Doctoral Fellow
Cooper Kansala - Ph.D. Student
Etienne Sellar - MSc. Student
Kainaath Batool - Scientific Illustrator
Interns and Thesis Students:
Trinity Saad - Undergraduate researcher