Tiny Brains, Big Worlds: When Butterflies Think They’re Real
AI made brain neurons with big dreams...
Let’s play a little game. Imagine you’re a brain in a jar. (No, not a metaphor for your 9-to-5 job.) A literal, teeny-tiny human brain grown in a lab, floating around like a piece of jello at a church picnic. Sounds like the setup for a bad horror movie, right? Well, science went ahead and made it real. And then plugged those tiny brains into video games. Because of course they did.
Level One. Welcome to The Matrix
An Australian military funded project by Cortical Labs, in partnership with Monash University, built a system called DishBrain. They grew brain-cell Organoids (yep new word) on a micro-electrode array and taught them to play Pong. Shockingly, the little blob of neurons showed signs of awareness and responsiveness. Basically the wetware equivalent of a real life Matrix.
Level Two. So You’re a Butterfly Now
Then the Swiss startup FinalSpark decided to take it up a notch. Their platform, Neuroplatform, hooks up 16 human brain Organoids to a virtual environment. In one experiment, they gave the Organoid a digital body. A butterfly. No training. No tutorial. Just straight sensory input. If the brain could think about its existence, it would probably conclude: I flap, therefore I am.
Level Three. Renting Tiny Brains
Here’s where things get Silicon Valley ridiculous. FinalSpark actually offers brain-as-a-service. You can subscribe to access their Neuro-platform, renting out 16 tiny brains to run computations for you. Forget AWS Cloud…this is AWS Squish.
Meanwhile, Cortical Labs is working on hardware plus wetware devices like their CL1 “brain on a chip.”
Back in 2008, early prototypes even controlled little robots. And yes, that technically makes them cyborgs. The kind that make your Roomba look like a wind-up toy.
Boss Level. What It All Means
In one short year, we’ve gone from a tiny brain playing Pong, to tiny brain living its best butterfly life. At this rate, don’t be shocked if someone’s already stuck one into a humanoid robot in a lab with flickering fluorescent lights.
The implications are massive. This isn’t just biology or engineering. It’s a mashup of both. A new form of computation where your future Gmail spam filter might be powered by an Organoid that thinks it’s a moth.
And here’s the kicker! Cortical Labs DishBrain might not just be about video games or butterfly fantasies. One day, it could help us tackle something like dementia. Picture it. Instead of grandma forgetting your name, she suddenly remembers your embarrassing middle school haircut in 4K detail.
By studying how these Organoids form and repair connections, scientists could learn how to reboot the brain’s save file function. Basically, the same neurons that got good at Pong might teach us how to press undo on memory loss. Imagine explaining that at Thanksgiving. “Yes, Nana’s memory came back…thanks to a blob of brain cells that thinks it’s Neo.”
Final Thought
So let’s recap the still unbelievable (at least to me…)
Australia’s Cortical Labs built DishBrain to play Pong.
Switzerland’s FinalSpark built NeuroPlatform to let brains think they’re butterflies.
Both companies are renting out neurons like Netflix subscriptions…. but called Brain as a Service (BaaS).
And the next step? Who knows.
But when the next butterfly in your backyard starts trying to log into Zoom, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Danielle Striker is a technology and AI futurist who makes the weirdest frontiers of science funny, fascinating, and a little less scary.