Some years ago (9+) Professor DeMarse published some papers on training petri dish brains cells how to "fly a plane" (or more appropriately "keep a simulated plane from crashing"). I have a copy of the paper at home, but can't think of the title, (it was kind of hard to find a copy since it wasn't publicly available online). You might look at what his lab is currently working on though.

http://neural.bme.ufl.edu/