Scientists create a LEGO robot that’s controlled by a worm’s brain

When we call, nay, insult someone with the term “bird brain”, we are more or less dissing the lack of grey matter up there, which has resulted to some really foolish actions. Perhaps you can boil it down to inexperience or immaturity, it does not matter, there are some moments in life when during a moment of weakness, we end up with some rather hare brained decisions. 

Scientists with the Open Worm project took the connections between the 302 neurons of a worm’s brain and simulated them in software, which they uploaded to a simple robot made of Legos. You can see the robot reacting to its sensory environment via a sonar sensor in place of the body and motors down its side. “The behavior is impressive considering that no instructions were programmed into this robot,” Smithsonian magazine noted. “All it has is a network of connections mimicking those in the brain of a worm.” The ultimate goal of the Open Worm project is to create a virtual worm inside a computer. So, weird as it seems, this odd endeavor is perhaps a tiny step towards one day uploading a human brain into a computer.