'KING PONG

a fancily-named study in a fancy journal replicates some previous findings & gets picked up by almost every news outlet in the known mediaverse. neurons in a dish can be trained to play simple games.  

original article: Kagan et al., 2022 (Neuron), reported in: The Guardian by Tory Shepherd on 12th October 2022

this story was in episode 32 #pong #freeenergy #sentience #replication


the error bar says

producing an unpopular brain science news podcast takes a lot of work & there has to be some editorial selection of which news stories to cover. in the last few weeks, lots of media has got excited about the neurons in a dish that were trained to play the game 'pong'. so the error bar investigated.

i read the abstract of the paper as far as the words 'free energy principle' & then vomited.

for listeners interested in the story, i recommend some of the discussion on pubpeer.com & twitter.


conclusion

pong