Miniature brains grown in the lab have human-like neural activity

Scientists growing miniature brains in a lab have created neural networks that act like those in the human brain. They hope the discovery will enable cheaper and easier research into brain diseases and drug development. In recent years researchers have been working on creating small, three-dimensional human brains, or cerebral organoids. The hope is that they will eventually replace animal models, imaging techniques and autopsies as tools for understanding the brain. These simplified organoids have some of the architecture of the brain's cerebral cortex – which is responsible for many of the features that make us human, such as thinking, perceiving, memory and language.