Isolated brain

In philosophy, the brain in a vat is any of a variety of thought experiments intended to draw out certain features of our ideas about knowledge, reality, truth, mind, and meaning.

The inherently philosophical idea has also become a staple of many science fiction stories, with many such stories involving a mad scientist who might remove a person's brain from the body, suspend it in a vat of life-sustaining liquid, and connect its neurons by wires to a supercomputer which would provide it with electrical impulses identical to those the brain normally receives.

According to such science fiction stories, the computer would then be simulating a virtual reality (including appropriate responses to the brain's own output) and the person with the "disembodied" brain would continue to have perfectly normal conscious experiences without these being related to objects or events in the real world.

In 2004 Thomas DeMarse and Karl Dockendorf made an "adaptive flight control with living neuronal networks on microelectrode arrays".

[14][15] Teams at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Reading have created neurological entities integrated with a robot body.