Human brain cells in a dish learn to play videogame

Human and mouse brain cells grown in the lab have learned to play the tennis-like videogame, Pong.

An international team from Australia, the UK and Canada has produced a 'mini-brain', called DishBrain, from human or mouse stem cells. They connected both the human and mouse DishBrain systems to the video game Pong, where a paddle is used to control the back and forth movement of a ball. Within five minutes, both DishBrains had learned how to play the game. Despite often missing the ball, its success rate was notably above that of random chance. This is the first time brain cells in a dish have been plugged into, and interacted with, an external environment.

The chief scientific officer of Cortical Labs, Melbourne, Australia, Dr Brett Kagan, who lead the study, explained: 'Using this DishBrain system, we have demonstrated that… in vitro cortical neurons can self-organise activity to display intelligent and sentient behaviour… in a simulated game-world.'

Sentient behaviour is the ability to perceive or feel things. The DishBrain systems' learned to play the game independently, as they were reacting to the given stimulus of the game in an attempt to make their environment predictable. This demonstrates that the DishBrains' work similarly to a real brain, rather than an AI computer system.

Publishing their findings in the journal Neuron, the authors noted that the human cells could rally the ball for longer than the mouse cells. Furthermore, when the mini-brain 'lost' the game and the ball restarted at a random location, the cells used more energy recalibrating, demonstrating their reaction to this new situation. Thus, they described the DishBrain system as sentient, working similarly to real brain intelligence.

However, not all experts agreed that the DishBrain system was sentient, Dr Dean Burnett, from Cardiff Psychology School, who was not involved in the study, preferred to use the term 'thinking system'. He told the BBC, 'There is information being passed around and clearly used, causing changes, so the stimulus they are receiving is being 'thought about' in a basic way'.

Professor Tara Spires-Jones, the UK Dementia Research Institute programme lead and deputy director at the University of Edinburgh, who was also not involved in the study, said, 'Don't worry, while these dishes of neurons can change their responses based on stimulation, they are not sci-fi style intelligence in a dish, these are simple circuit responses.'

The team's next steps include introducing the DishBrain system to ethanol, to see if it can 'get drunk'. This will allow the team to observe if its cognitive abilities are affected as they would be in a human.

The team hope that the DishBrain system could potentially offer an alternative to animal testing, producing a more ethical replacement for this method of scientific testing… they also hope the technology can be used in the future to test new drugs and treatments for neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's.