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Episode 9: The Brain in A Box that Learned to Kill episode artwork

Mar 18, 2026 8 min

Episode 9: The Brain in A Box that Learned to Kill

from Strange Bites Hosted by Lance Martin

Where does the soul live when the body is optional? Are these cells suffering in their little box every time the Doom marine dies? Or are they… happy? Is learning the only joy a brain really needs? And the darkest question of all: if two hundred thousand cells can learn to play Doom in a week… what happens when we scale it to billions? When we connect thousands of CL1s together? When the “material” wakes up and realizes it’s trapped inside our games, our wars, our dreams? We didn’t just invent a new computer. We invented a new kind of prisoner. And we’re handing out the keys on GitHub. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2517389-human-brain-cells-on-a-chip-learned-to-play-doom-in-a-week/ https://corticallabs.com/ https://corticallabs.com/cl1 https://corticallabs.com/research https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRV8fSw6HaE https://github.com/SeanCole02/doom-neuron https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00806-6 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2022.09.001 https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/200-000-living-human-neurons-on-a-microchip-demonstrated-playing-doom-cortical-labs-cl1-video-shows-the-gameplay-and-explains-how-the-neurons-learn-the-game https://newatlas.com/brain/cortical-bioengineered-intelligence/ Music from #Uppbeat https://uppbeat.io/t/adi-goldstein/blank-light License code: UMTSYQNNG4THEG5C

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