Scientists Teach Brain Cells To Play Pong In A Petri Dish
Remember Pong? That classic game with the two bars and the bouncing ball. It was Atari times (late 70s) so cut this game some slack Gen-Zers. Pong had to walk so the FIFA games could sprint.
The game has extremely simple mechanics. So much so, that a group of scientists from Melbourne, Australia conducted an experiment using brain cells in a petri dish – and as the title suggests, actually managed to teach the cells to play Pong.
The project, affectionately labelled ‘DishBrain‘ by the research team, is a lab-grown cell system comprised of over 800,000 human and mouse neurons.
The team booted up a virtual simulation of Pong after mounting the aforementioned neurons onto a monitoring device where activity was recorded in “spikes”. The brain cells were used as paddles for the game to hit and catch a simulated ball.
When the spikes got stronger it meant that a neuron moved a paddle and hit the ball. This…
