Human brain cells grown in lab learn to play Pong after just five MINUTES of training

It's the classic table tennis-themed video game that tasks players with moving a paddle vertically across a screen to hit a ball. And now even human brain cells grown in a lab have mastered Pong. Researchers from Melbourne-based start-up, Cortical Labs, have shown for the first time that 800,000 brain cells can perform goal-directed tasks – in this case, Pong. The findings suggest that even brain cells in a petri dish can exhibit inherent intelligence, modifying their behaviour over time. 'This new capacity to teach cell cultures to perform a task in which they exhibit sentience – by controlling the paddle to return the ball via sensing – opens up new discovery possibilities which will have far-reaching consequences for technology, health, and society,' said Dr Adeel Razi, an author of the study.