The "neurons are growing on top of a multi-electrode array and form a living 'brain' that's hooked up to a flight simulator on a desktop computer. When information on the simulated aircraft's horizontal and vertical movements are fed into the brain by stimulating the electrodes, the neurons fire away in patterns that are then used to control its 'body' -- the simulated aircraft," reports Wired News.
"It's as if the neurons control the stick in the aircraft, they can move it back and forth and left and right," said Thomas DeMarse, a professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Florida who has been working on the project for more than a year. "The electrodes allow us to record the activity from the neurons and stimulate them so we can listen to the conversation among the neurons and also input information back into the neural network."
"Granted, this is just a handful of neurons in a dish," said Potter, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech's neuroengineering laboratory. "It isn't a full-blown brain. It doesn't have a real body. But with this kind of system you can literally watch these things compute and you have a chance to learn how the brain does its computation."
DeMarse, T. B., Wagenaar, D. A., Blau, A. W. and Potter, S. M. (2001). "The Neurally Controlled Animat: Biological Brains Acting with Simulated Bodies." Autonomous Robots 11: 305-310. Reprint (600 Kb PDF) .