Three mini-brains are better than one, apparently. At least, when it comes to reading Braille.

Brain organoids are lab-grown nuggets of cells normally found in the human brain that pulse with electrical activity.

One nugget can contain more neurons – cells that chat with the nervous system – than a fruit fly or bee. Some can even play the video game Pong.

And now scientists have made these mushy brains respond to the writing system used by blind or visually impaired people.

University of Bristol researchers grew three organoids that have 0.00001% of the 86billion neurons a human brain has, they wrote in their paper published last week in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence.

‘They’re definitely not miniature human brains,’ first author and PhD candidate Tianyi Liu tells Metro.

‘They’re tiny, three-dimensional cultures of human brain tissue, about half a millimetre across, containing neurons and other supporting cells.’

Before you ask, no, Liu says, they’re not ‘conscious’, but they can live for about 100 days.

‘You can think of them as small pieces of living tissue capable of producing neural activity, rather than scaled-down human brains,’ she adds.

…But they can read Braille?
Most of the time, at least.

Liu and her team built an ‘organoid computer’ – hooking them up to a machine learning algorithm which could decode their neuronal activity.

A robotic touch sensor jolted the mini-brains with 26 different electrical signals that represent the tactile data for the letters of the Braille alphabet.

The AI then used the organoid’s signals to guess which Braille letter was being said.

The organoids could report which Braille letter had been zapped at them 61% of the time, the AI found.

Read More: Lab-grown human mini-brains can read Braille