Brainet (organic computing with linked brains)

Nicolelis's group extended animal BBIs into brainets: several brains wired together with recording and microstimulation to act as a single distributed computing substrate. In rats, three or four cortically-linked brains could jointly perform simple computations — pattern classification, discrete store-and-retrieve, and toy prediction tasks — sometimes outperforming a single rat. In monkeys, a brainet of two or three animals shared control of a virtual arm, each contributing a subset of the movement dimensions so the group cursor reached the target only when the animals cooperated.

The framing as organic computing is provocative but the demonstrations are modest: the tasks are low-dimensional, the computation is largely the experimenters' training and readout doing the heavy lifting, and there is no evidence the linked brains form new emergent representations beyond coordinated output. Brainets are best read as shared-control neuroprosthetics rather than a new kind of biological computer.