Surely not

Surely I can't be the only person in the world who finds this just a bit, creepy, strange, weird, frightening and slotting somewhere into "don't you have better things to do?"

This was taken from The University of Texas:

A University of Texas scientist has grown a living "brain" that can control the video game Quake 3: Arena made by id Software, allowing scientists to study how brain cells compute and deal with sensory input.

The "brain," a group of 50,000 nerve cells taken from a dog and raised in a Petri dish,  lets scientists observe brain functions at the cellular level in real time. Scientists hope to better understand how the brain deals with sensory input which may lead to treatments for certain types of blindness and brain trauma.

....

Location awareness, collision detection, and eventually enemy location data is fed to the "brain" through the feedback system. The neurons analyze the data and send signals to the game controls. After several trials the neurons progress to the point where they can actually navigate a level and engage an enemy, usually a simple computer controlled character, called a bot, included in the game.

I am taking this with a grain of scepticism,  I think half hoping it's a hoax.

It just doesn't sit well with me. I can't help but think of Peter Chung's episode in The Animatrix, Matriculated. Also I feel a little uneasy about the fact that after 9 hours of learning the "brain" could fight a bot in Quake 3, what happens when the brain becomes more self aware and discovers it's just trapped in an artificial world?

I also can't help but think this whole thing started something like this :-

Student A: "Hey man wouldn't it be awesome if the AI in Quake 3 was better?"
Student B: "Yeah like you were playing against real players?"
Student A: "Wouldn't it be cool if we could, like, have a brain controlling players?"
Student B: "We could hook the brain straight to the computer!"
Student A: "That would be so cool!"

And here we are... Dog brain playing Quake....