There's a video on YouTube where someone has managed to train a network of rat neurons to play doom, the way they did it seems reminiscent of how we train ML models

I am under the impression from the video that real neurons are a lot better at learning than simulated ones (and much less power demanding)

Could any ML problems, such as natural language generation be solved using neurons instead and would that be in any way practical?

Ethically at this point is this neuron array considered conscious in any way?