Australian scientists taught brain cells to play the infamous Doom video game

Australian biotechnology company Cortical Labs has put human brain cells grown in the laboratory to play the classic 1990s first-person shooter Doom, connecting living neurons to a silicon chip that interfaces them with a digital environment. The neurons learn to respond to the digital environment in real-time and adapt accordingly. According to the scientists, this is only the first step, as the potential of nerve cultures is far broader.

Australian biotechnology company Cortical Labs has achieved an unprecedented scientific breakthrough: human brain cells grown in the laboratory have been made to play Doom, the iconic 1990s first-person shooter. Living neurons are connected to a special silicon chip that enables them to communicate with the digital environment.

The neurons respond to game events in real-time, learning to adapt to the digital world. Scientists have observed that nerve cultures are able to change their behavior during gameplay — indicating some kind of learning process is occurring at the cellular level.

According to the Cortical Labs team, this experiment is only the first step in merging biological and digital computation. The scientists believe the real potential of living neurons may extend far beyond simple video games — in the future, such hybrid systems could be used to solve complex problems that conventional computers cannot process efficiently.

Doom was released in 1993 and is one of the most influential video games in history. In recent decades, the game has become something of a cultural benchmark — it has been run on virtually everything from pregnancy tests to smart refrigerators — but a version based on living brain cells is undoubtedly the most extraordinary variant yet.