Getting "Doom" to run on all sorts of things is a favorite pastime of the tech enthusiast, and id's classic title is now available on everything from pregnancy tests to potatoes. One of my favorites is not how to get Doom to run, but how to train rats named Carmack and Romero to play Doom.

Now YouTuber The Thought Emporium is taking it a step further with an experiment that alternates between surprise and fear and leads to deep philosophical thinking about cacodemons. In this experiment, a network of neurons in lab-grown rats is trained to play doom.

The experiment uses cortical rat neurons because they are affordable and have sufficient learning capacity for this purpose (you can order a million frozen rat neurons online, too!). Yes, human neurons could be used for the same purpose, and I bet someone watching this video would go order them in a heartbeat, but human neurons are expensive and playing doom seems like overkill since it can be narrowed down to relatively simple yes/no patterns.

So Thought Emporium more or less deconstructs Doom as a top-down 2D game rather than 3D. Thus, neurons must perform actions such as moving forward or backward, rotating the character, firing, and switching weapons. The neurons themselves are associated with an electrode array of 46 electrodes, which can somehow be triggered. However, these electrodes can be triggered in patterns based on audio stimuli that spatially convey the above elements of the game.

The video details the process of growing neurons. Neurons gradually cluster over time, in some cases forming blob-like clumps that are too large for the purposes of the experiment. In one scene, The Thought Emporium refers to these patterns of neurons and dendrites as a "galaxy," which seems entirely correct, but one cannot help but feel a creeping sense of unease as one understands what is meant (the refrigerator for sample storage is

Every time a neuron makes a kill in the game, a "pleasant tone" is played, and when a kill is made, the stimulating electrode plays an "unpleasant tone". Yes, this is Pavlov's dog, but it is using a neural network, not a pack of dogs. If this is starting to feel like the Matrix, then yes, it is. I keep telling myself that this is a rat's neurons playing "Doom," not an existential message that your treasured "Ultra Violence" was not so impressive.

The Thought Emporium details some of the ways in which neurons are stored and encouraged to grow, and outlines some of the techniques they are pursuing to create organoids and the like from the self-assembly of neurons. They further outline the next step of growing neurons from skin cells rather than buying them, from a cost standpoint, rather than "concocting pet store rats" (which, to be clear, they are not doing). At this point, you may be thinking of "Quake" instead of "Doom". Quake" is one heck of a game, a mixture of squishy organic life forms and razor-edged machines, but that's just neurons talking.

The Thought Emporium shows off some clips of Doom being manipulated by neurons, but much of this video focuses on the process of getting there.

Much of this is quite incomprehensible, and I feel that my ethical discomfort is probably an outlier when many people watch this and think about how wonderful it is to gain consciousness and realize that you are the Doom guy.

I.D. made the most epic and grotesque title about mankind's counterattack against horrors that in some cases turn out to be too artificial. I have always thought "Can you run Doom?" was a truly ludicrous question. But "Can you play Doom?" started to hurt me a lot with this one; according to The Thought Emporium's Twitter feed, they are "as close as you can get to a real mad scientist."