Tiny Blobs of Brain Cells Could Reveal How Your Mind Differs from a Neanderthals

> In recent years, scientists have figured out how to grow blobs of hundreds of thousands of live human neurons that look — and act — something like a brain.

This concept makes me substantially more uneasy now after reading the "Lena" short story that was on the front page earlier [0], involving a digital copy of a person's brain that was subsequently duplicated and simulated millions of times over a period of decades (or longer). The idea seemed like a cross between the original Lena image and HeLa cells[1], with the added factor of consciousness.

Sure these "brain organoids" probably can't think in the same way or scale that humans can, but still, we're growing pieces of human brains...

0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26224835 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa