A few blobs of lab-grown brain tissue have demonstrated a striking proof of concept: living neural circuits can be nudged toward solving a classic control problem through carefully structured feedback.

In a closed-loop system that delivered electrical feedback based on performance, cortical organoids could steadily improve their control of a classic engineering benchmark: balancing an unstable virtual pole.

The improvement is far from a functioning hybrid biocomputer. But as a proof of concept, it shows that neural tissue in a dish can be adaptively tuned through structured feedback – a result that could help researchers probe how neurological disease alters the brain’s capacity for plasticity.