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Growing Living Rat Neurons To Play... DOOM? | Part 1

The Thought Emporium · 4.5M views · 2023-07-10 · 27:10

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Overview

The Thought Emporium grows living rat neurons on an electrode array and tries to train them to play Doom. It is part of a series on biological computing.

On Hacker News

Cited whenever biocomputing or neurons-on-chip come up, as an accessible example of how such a system can be built.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2023–2026

Topics

Neuroscience & the brainBiology & biotechnology
Search by tags
neuronsdoombiocomputingneurosciencediy biotech

What people said

chneu · 2025-06 · Strong recommendation

The YouTuber "The Thought Emporium" has been working on a similar project for a few years. [VIDEO] They run an amazing channel that covers a variety of topics. Highly recommend. The mummification video is fun.

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fenykep · 2026-03 · Recommendation

I think the Thought Emporium youtube channel has some explanatory [videos]( [VIDEO] ) of the whole process. I couldn't wrap my head around the thing tho.

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zonkerdonker · 2024-05 · Recommendation

Anyone ineterested in more wetware projects should check out the series from The Thought Emporium on youtube: [VIDEO] They are attempting to train a (literal) neural network to play DOOM. And yes, it os as fascinating and horrifying as it sounds. It's hard not to extrapolate 50 years down the line with this tech. Stuff gets complicated quick. How many human neurons do you have to use before you get an actual human consiousness?

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Sources

Video by The Thought Emporium, played through YouTube.

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