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The things scientists do! Getting neurons to play pong is kind of weird, fascinating, and incredibly important at the same time.
Kind of weird because it sounds like some sort of strange scientific experiment whereby neurons, brain cells, can be wired up to a computer to do useless things. But that may be a lay person’s first impression. The implications are quite dramatic. It means that a group of individual brain cells growing in a petri dish can exhibit “intelligent” behaviours.
That is fascinating but also an incredibly important insight.
So, what did these researchers actually do?
This was a collaboration between 10 different institutions led by Brett Kagan and the goal was to see how simple systems can adapt and learn behaviours in an environment. We tend to think of the brain as incredibly complex and advanced, as in the human brain, but in research often much simpler brains such as that of worms are used. They have very simple brains but can still have a behavioural repertoire and respond and adapt to the environment that belies the brain’s simplicity.
The researchers grew neurons in a petri dish — these show spontaneous electrical activity — brain cells can’t but help to communicate to each other. The cells were sitting on a mesh that was linked in a closed loop to a…
