Melbourne, October 14
Scientists have grown 8,00,000 brain cells in a lab that they say have learned to play the 1970s tennis-like video game, Pong.
The research, published recently in the journal Neuron, has for the first time shown that brain cells living in a dish can perform goal-directed tasks.
The team, including researchers from Monash University, RMIT University, University College London and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research are now going to find out what happens when their DishBrain is affected by medicines and alcohol.
To conduct the experiment, the researchers took mouse cells from embryonic brains as well as some human brain cells derived from stem cells and grew them on top of microelectrode arrays that could both stimulate them and read their activity.
