SOMETHING NEW is on the menu of neuroscience. It is called “DishBrain”. This is not a recently discovered regional delicacy, but rather a network of nerve cells, grown on a computer chip, which is capable of interacting with the outside world via that chip. As a proof of principle, Brett Kagan, chief scientific officer of Cortical Labs, a small firm in Melbourne, Australia, and his collaborators, have taught the cells to play Pong, an early video game that resembles an electronic form of table tennis.

DishBrain is smaller than a human being’s little-finger nail and contains fewer nerve cells than a bee. Those cells are grown from pluripotent stem cells, which are, in turn, derived from ordinary body cells, and can differentiate into more or less any sort of tissue. Dr Kagan experimented with cells from both mice and humans.