Brain Cell Ping Pong
This is pong. The first video game. Ping pong on a black and white screen. A game that is ancient. A game that is boring. And a game that is so simple… scientists tought a petri dish full of brain cells to play it.
Let me repeat that because it sounds so ridiculous. They taught a dish full of living brain cells how to play pong. part of research about the human brain… and how it works differently than a computer … they plopped these 800-thousand brain cells into a glass dish… and the cells gradually learned… this is the ball. This is the paddle… here’s how you play.
The brain cells were grown on a silicon chip in a bath of nutrients. That chip chip send electrical signals to the cells and transmits them from the cells… which the researchers named dish brain. to help it learn…. when it got something right… scientists sent a sweet electrical signal. If they got it wrong… they got white noise.
Dish Brain never got that good at pong… because 800-thousand cells is about the number you’d find in a cockroach. Make the brain network bigger… and it’d get better… which indicates our computers may someday be made of humming thrumming human brain cells.