Forscher trainierten Gehirnorganoide, im Labor gezüchtete winzige Stücke Gehirngewebe, um ein grundlegendes Benchmark-Problem in der Technik zu lösen, das als „umgekehrtes Pendel“ oder „Wagen-Pole“-Problem bezeichnet wird. Dies ist die erste rigorose akademische Demonstration des zielgerichteten Lernens in im Labor gezüchteten Gehirnorganoiden.

Brain organoids can be trained to solve a goal-directed task

UC Santa Cruz researchers are exploring how brains learn, adapt, and improve, which could help us better understand and address neurological conditions.

Imagine balancing a ruler vertically in the palm of your hand: you have to constantly pay attention to the angle of the ruler and make many small adjustments to make sure it doesn’t fall over. It takes practice to get good at this.

**In engineering, this is called the “inverted pendulum” or “cart-pole” problem**, in which a control system learns to balance an upright pole hinged to a moveable cart. This problem is used as a benchmark in fields like robotics, control theory, and artificial intelligence to gauge if a control system can adaptively process and respond to information in a useful way. It’s relevant even in our earliest days—every human infant needs to solve a problem just like this in order to become a toddler.

**Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, trained brain organoids, tiny pieces of brain tissue grown in the lab, to solve this fundamental benchmark problem**. By using electrical signals to send and receive information from the organoids, the researcher’s software coached the lab-grown brain tissue to significantly improve its performance at the cart-pole problem.

**This research is the first rigorous academic demonstration of goal-directed learning in lab-grown brain organoids, and lays the foundation for adaptive organoid computation—exploring the capacity of lab-grown brain organoids to learn and solve tasks.**

For those interested, here’s the link to the peer reviewed journal article:

https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(26)00062-8