A living "brain" of cultured rat cells can control an F-22 flight simulator

I actually meet DeMarse in Florida. I made it a point to try and speak with him about his "brain in a dish". He was clearly aggravated with me. He told me about all the other amazing things his lab was doing, and how "dumb" his "brain in a dish" actually was. It was obvious to me that he felt the attention his "brain in a dish" had received was unwarranted.

Whenever I hear stuff like this, I feel an existential crisis looming.<p>I'm about 99% sure that I'm not just a brain in a dish plugged into a simulator.

When this story broke it inspired a similar story about a dog brain in a dish playing Quake 3, which was later revealed to be a hoax: <a href="http://home.actlab.utexas.edu/~dbailey/project1.html" rel="nofollow">http://home.actlab.utexas.edu/~dbailey/project1.html</a>

How did the brain know what situations were good or bad? Were there reward and pain electrodes or something?

Here's the paper: <a href="http://neural.bme.ufl.edu/page13/assets/NeuroFlght2.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://neural.bme.ufl.edu/page13/assets/NeuroFlght2.pdf</a><p>It looks like they're using a combination of high and low frequency pulses as a reward/punishment mechanism, though I don't fully understand how that influences the decisions being made. Would love if someone could explain it in more detail.

<i>Though the "brain" can successfully control a flight simulation program, more elaborate applications are a long way off, DeMarse said.</i><p>Because <i>flying a jet</i> isn't all that impressive!?

I just realized this was from 2004. Ah well, fascinating anyway. Wonder whatever happened with all that.

Oh great, they invented a Cylon Raider. This'll end well.

I wonder what the functional difference is between rat brain cells and human brain cells.

Odd, this is from 2004, so it's 8 years old, which is like a century in tech years. I'm surprised I have not heard of more advancements in this (creepy!) field.

And oh the fun that the ethics questions will become if this takes root and if the brains somehow show a level of consciousness in the future.

How do you grow the rat brain? How hard is it to keep the rat brain alive? How hard would it be to mass produce rat brain CPUs?

I found this paper on the "semi-living artist" mentioned in the article fascinating. <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2533587/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2533587/</a><p>Answered a lot of my questions about how the brain was cultured and stimulated.

Rat brains? Paul Linebarger is rolling in his grave.<p>[See "The Game of Rat and Dragon" if you don't get it.] <a href="http://www.troynovant.com/Franson/Smith-C/Game-Rat-Dragon.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.troynovant.com/Franson/Smith-C/Game-Rat-Dragon.ht...</a>

25k cells. Even if the brain is fully connected bidirectionally, it has at most 625M connections. Can it be simulated by software?

Kind of creepy, reminds me of the Stanislaw Lem story about the mouse brain over ride in the long duration starship.

Pinky: "Gee, Brain, what do you want to do tonight?"<p>The Brain: "The same thing we do every night, Pinky—try to take over the world!"

Old news. Simple PID controller.

I wonder what the minimum number of neurons is to successfully fly the plane.

good idea, lets have animal brains into our skynet robots. they totally don't hate us for exterminating a species a week.

Beginning to a Rat powered Skynet?

Kevin Warwick has a more up to date version of this controlling a robot in his lab at Reading Uni - <a href="http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/biomedical/bionics/rat-brain-robot-grows-up" rel="nofollow">http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/biomedical/bionics/rat-br...</a><p>Presumably someone, somewhere has a bathtub of human neurons and is probably using them to try and predict the stock exchange.

the singularity is near...