Brain cells in dish learn to play video game

These findings open the door to a new type of research into biological information processors, complementing normal digital computers.

Neuroscientists have shown that lab-grown brain cells can learn to play the classic video game Pong, and could be capable of "intelligent and sentient behavior."

Brett Kagan, who led a study published in the journal Neuron Wednesday, told AFP his findings open the door to a new type of research into biological information processors, complementing normal digital computers.

"What machines can't do is learn things very quickly -- if you need a machine learning algorithm to learn something, it requires thousands of data samples," he explained.

"But if you ask a human, or train a dog, a dog can learn a trick in two or three tries."

Kagan, chief scientific officer at Melbourne-based Cortical Labs, set out to answer whether there is a way to harness the inherent intelligence of neurons.

Kagan and colleagues took mice cells from embryonic brains, and derived human neurons from adult stem cells.

They then grew them on top of microelectrode arrays that could read their activity and stimulate them. The experiments involved a cluster of around 800,000 neurons, roughly the size of a bumblebee brain.