A few blobs of lab-grown brain tissue have demonstrated a striking proof of concept: living neural circuits can be nudged toward solving a classic control problem through carefully structured feedback.
In a closed-loop system that delivered electrical feedback based on performance, cortical organoids could steadily improve their control of a classic engineering benchmark: balancing an unstable virtual pole.
The improvement is far from a functioning hybrid biocomputer. But as a proof of concept, it shows that neural tissue in a dish can be adaptively tuned through structured feedback – a result that could help researchers probe how neurological disease alters the brain’s capacity for plasticity.
“We’re trying to understand the fundamentals of how neurons can be adaptively tuned to solve problems,” says Ash Robbins,…