Home-grown brain controlling Flight Simulator 2005?!

Wired News writes “Somewhere in Florida, 25,000 disembodied rat neurons are thinking about flying an F-22.”

Sentences like these are normally authored only by people like Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams, and made known to mere mortals only at the most awkward of times, when the resulting laughter will have the most catastrophic outcome. Like when you’ve just sat down for your daily glass of skimmed milk, thus fundamentally altering the manner in which bodily passageways are utilized for ingesting food. This normally results in your colleagues or friends getting drowned in fluids or bits of rye bread that have been manipulated solely by your nasal area and mucociliary transport system, which is an interesting sight to watch, if nothing else.

Anyway. The story is about how a scientist at the University of Florida has discovered how to make a collection of rat neurons interact with each other in a petri dish. He then connects them to a grid of electrodes, and watches how they manage to learn to fly an F-22 fighter jet – even in very rough weather.

If that’s not science fiction without the fiction part, then I just don’t know.

Slashdot.org also writes about the original press release.