Mind in Vitro -- Engineering living neural architectures for learning, memory, and directed emergence

We present Living Neurosheets: practical, malleable, and modular platforms for the realization of complex in vitro neural architectures, bio-inspired or beyond evolutionary bounds. By innervating porous sheets, substrates employed for millennia in the form of paper are here reimagined, inheriting neural function and exceptional versatility. By cutting, folding, and stacking, previously inaccessible neural topologies are realized. When matched to tissue-specific optoelectronics and computational design, neurosheets deliver a powerful framework for the multimodal interrogation of neural motifs. We illustrate its potential via planar tissues, gyri-inspired manifolds, and laminar cortical mimics, demonstrating control over entrainment, synchronization, propagation, suppression, and augmentation dynamics, recapitulating fundamental building blocks of in vivo neural processing.