Episode
#121 Meet The Neuroscientist Teaching Neuron's in a Dish to Play Video Games
- Podcast
- Giants Shoulder
- Published
- May 18, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 4623
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Summary
Join the #1 Community Dedicated to Rigorous & Radical Biology: https://www.skool.com/the-giants-shoulder-6526/about Brett Kagan is the Chief Scientific Officer at Cortical Labs, the Australian startup that fuses living human neurons with silicon chips to create a fundamentally new kind of intelligence. His team's DishBrain paper showed that neurons in a dish learned to play Pong in under five minutes — without any reward signal — providing some of the strongest experimental evidence for Karl Friston's Free Energy Principle. Expect to learn how neurons on a chip actually play Pong and Doom, why unpredictable stimulation drives learning better than reward, what the Free Energy Principle really says and where Brett disagrees with Friston, why 200,000 neurons outperform 800,000 on certain tasks, how Brett's baby daughter staring at fractals led to a new theory of intelligence, why no AI system can walk into your kitchen and make a cup of tea, what biological data centres look like and why they already exist, and much more… Timestamps: 00:00 Trailer 02:30 Brett Kagan — Neurons Playing Doom 03:04 The stepping stones from Pong to Doom 04:00 What is the CL1 and Cortical Cloud? 05:20 The moonshot goal of Cortical Labs 06:46 Giant buildings of neurons as computation hubs 07:13 The biocomputing data centre already running in Melbourne 07:38 Not building a brain in a dish 09:00 What does a biological computer actually look like? 09:29 Electricity as the shared language between biology and silicon 10:49 How neurons on a chip play Pong 11:10 Topographic mapping inspired by the whisker barrel system 13:10 Why the neurons hit the ball — and what happens when they miss 14:33 The Free Energy Principle explained simply 16:03 The trap door analogy for unpredictable stimulation 18:42 H…