Posthuman Blues

UF scientist: 'Brain' in a dish acts as autopilot, living computer

"When DeMarse first puts the neurons in the dish, they look like little more than grains of sand sprinkled in water. However, individual neurons soon begin to extend microscopic lines toward each other, making connections that represent neural processes. 'You see one extend a process, pull it back, extend it out -- and it may do that a couple of times, just sampling who's next to it, until over time the connectivity starts to establish itself,' he said. '(The brain is) getting its network to the point where it's a live computation device.'" (Via Chapel Perilous.)

Impressively, they've got this chunk o' brain actually doing things. Thinking. Or at least computing.

I wrote an unpublished science fiction novel that features cars self-piloted by disembodied mouse brains. Peter Watts set his sights even higher in "Starfish" and "Maelstrom"; he predicts neural computers ("head cheeses") as the Internet's last line of defense against ravenous, near-sentient computer viruses.