The real world is so, so much stranger than fiction.

It’s terrifying.

I’m constantly aghast at how Wired News is the only place I can read about this sort of thing. Why is it not on the front page of every newspaper, worldwide?

At the University of Florida, Thomas DeMarse specialises in research and experimentation on Multi-Electrode Arrays (MEAs). As the University’s website explains, an MEA is “… essentially a brain in a dish – cultured neurons – which researchers can observe to study how the brain functions.”

Lately, DeMarse has been taking a petri dish full of living neurons taken from a rat’s brain, and hooking them up to a flight simulator. As one does. The living rat ‘brain’ thinks that the virtual jet fighter aeroplane is it’s ‘body’. The rat learns to fly a virtual F-22 in the same way that a child learns to walk.

Let’s go through that again.

A collection of living brain cells from a rat, in a petri dish, learns to fly a military jet fighter simulation.

This isn’t important enough to be reported on in the regular newspapers.

We live in a very, very strange world.

Wired News’ full article on the story is here.