Wow. Scientists have grown a brain. I won't try to explain it as I can't do it justice, check out the link.
"When DeMarse first puts the neurons in the dish, they look like little more than grains of sand sprinkled in water. However, individual neurons soon begin to extend microscopic lines toward each other, making connections that represent neural processes. You see one extend a process, pull it back, extend it out and it may do that a couple of times, just sampling who's next to it, until over time the connectivity starts to establish itself, he said. (The brain is) getting its network to the point where it's a live computation device.Posted by Boone at October 24, 2004 10:11 PMInitially when we hook up this brain to a flight simulator, it doesn't know how to control the aircraft, DeMarse said. So you hook it up and the aircraft simply drifts randomly. And as the data comes in, it slowly modifies the (neural) network so over time, the network gradually learns to fly the aircraft.