“I believe we are boring our cells to death. In cell culture, they're longing for input. They want to compute something. So they're forming circuits. They are spontaneously active. And when I first showed this, the patterns of neurons firing, some people were shocked because I said, yeah, they're thinking. And then I said, no, no, don't worry. They have nothing to think about. It has no input and no output.”
Giants Shoulder · October 2026
Context
Hartung, who grows brain organoids, on the idea behind "organoid intelligence": give the cultures input, output and feedback in what he calls a mind gym. He says early results show that simply feeding them signal patterns produces non-random connections.
Transcript
…one representing the reward system, the dopaminergic neurons, that we have them separately and can also, and they grow together, they interconnect. But we can, for example, just stimulate the dopaminergic neurons to say, yeah, you did good. You did well. So that's what we're building at the moment.
…Like we don't really understand how these things work in the body, how cells do goal modeling together and why one heart cell decides to become part of the larger heart. So I think these are really fundamental questions in biology. So I'm curious how they're being tackled at the organoid level.
I mean, I think I have to go one step back first. I believe we are boring our cells to death. You know, in cell culture, they're longing for input. They want to compute something. So they're forming circuits. They are spontaneously active. And when I first showed this, the patterns of neurons firing with calcium calcium imaging, some people were shocked because I said, yeah, they're thinking. And then I said, no, no, don't worry. They have nothing to think about. It has no input and no output. And in essence, this was the starting point for OI. Because I said, what happens if you give them input and allow them output and create a feedback, a closed-loop experiment? And I believe that this will lead to dramatic changes in the cell culture. You know, the body is extremely efficient. Everything which is not used, not in demand, is at least reduced in capacity or lost. If you ever had a broken leg, you saw how quickly your muscles you were working on for years are gone because they're not in use. There's no demand for them. And I believe this is the same for cellular functionality. A cell maintains the function which is in demand and it goes at least low on these. And this is a fundamental…
example of an input here that's a little different to just an electrode, electrical input, would be the pharmacology dimension that you mentioned? Like talk about how we might study some sort of new drug in an organoid system. Because this is also where it's interesting to me. These are lacking…
I mean, you can already use these very simple systems for some things like de-risking clinical trials. You know, we can do this acute learning and we can show that certain substances disturb it. So what we did use, for example, was an algae toxin, domoic acid. This is something if there's algae…
Interesting.
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