The ability to transport yourself to different places or moments with your thoughts was until now an ability thought to be reserved for humans, but a group of researchers discovered that rats also have imaginations.
To achieve this discovery, scientists at the Janelia Research Center of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Virginia (United States) developed a kind of ‘thought detector’, which is able to measure and monitor the neuronal activity of rats in real time. translate. This means that this medical institute revealed this on Thursday.
The system combines 360-degree virtual reality and a brain-machine interface (BMI) to explore rats’ inner thoughts by measuring electrical activity in the hippocampus, the area of the brain where memories are stored and generated.
When the brain remembers, there is a specific activity in the hippocampus related to this activity, but so far it has not been detected in animals.
The system allowed researchers to see how, like humans, when rodents experience places and events, specific patterns of neuronal activity are activated in their hippocampus.
Scientists thus discovered that a rat can activate hippocampal activity just by thinking about a place, without physically moving, that is, by imagining it.
As the first phase of the experiment, the researchers created a kind of “thought dictionary” that allowed them to decode the rat’s brain signals when it experienced something.
They then conducted two tests, which were ‘baptized’ with cinematic names.
In one of them, called “Jumper”, in tribute to the film and book whose main character can teleport, the mouse was introduced into the system and as it walked on a spherical tire, its movements were reflected on the 360-degree screen. . When he achieved his goal, he was rewarded.
The system recorded the activity of the rat’s hippocampus and showed how its neurons are activated as the rat ‘navigates’ to reach the goal.
The end result is that the animal uses its thoughts to achieve the reward, first thinking about where to go to get it, an imaginative process that humans regularly experience.
In the second experiment, called “Jedi”, in tribute to the Star Wars saga, the mouse is fixed on a virtual location and moves an object to a location just by thinking, in the same way that a person sitting can imagine him getting up. grab a cup of coffee, without moving.
The researchers then changed the target location, which required the animal to produce activity patterns associated with the new location.
The team found that mice can precisely and flexibly control hippocampal activity, just like humans.
Furthermore, animals can sustain this hippocampal activity for several seconds, a time comparable to the time it takes for humans to relive past events or imagine new scenarios.
“Imagination is one of the most amazing things humans can do. Now we’ve discovered that animals can do it too and we’ve found a way to study it,” one of the researchers, Albert Lee, pointed out.
The study also showed that the brain-machine interface (BMI) system can be used to investigate hippocampal activity, marking a major advance in the study of this important brain region.
Source: DN
