2023-11-02 18:11:37
Rats with imagination. It’s a bit… unimaginable! No ? However, this is what researchers have just demonstrated.
Imagination. It is undoubtedly one of the most remarkable qualities that human beings have been given. And surprise today, because researchers from Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI, United States) reveal to us, in the pages of the newspaper Science, that we are not the only animals to have received this gift. Rats, too, can be imaginative.
A rat’s thoughts detector
The story of this incredible discovery begins nine years ago. At the time, under the leadership of a very young researcher, teams from HHMI began working on the development of a system allowing us to understand what animals think. A kind of “thought detector” in real time capable of measuring neuronal activity and translating what it means. A feat in itself.
At the heart of the system, a brain-machine interface (BMI) which establishes a link between the electrical activity of the hippocampus of the rat tested and its position in a virtual reality setting. The hippocampus because it is the area of the brain responsible for spatial memory. This is where mental maps are stored that allow us to remember past events and imagine scenarios for the future. Thanks to BMI, the researchers hoped to be able to know if a rat is capable of activating its hippocampus at will, to think about a place without physically going there. If a rat can imagine going to a place.
Rats can imagine they are moving
For this, it was still necessary to develop as a “dictionary of thoughts” of the rat. A dictionary that would make it possible to decode recorded brain signals. To associate signals with an activity, the researchers made the rat walk on a carpet, translating its movements into virtual reality and they recorded everything.
Having trouble getting organized? Take the example of the rat
With the protocol in place, the researchers were able to translate the activity of the rat’s hippocampus into motion in virtual reality. And find that the animal uses its thoughts to navigate toward a reward by first thinking about where it needs to go. Like what we do when we imagine going shopping at the supermarket and we visualize the places we will pass along the way before we even leave our house.
A bit along the same lines, the researchers then allowed the rat to move an object to a location by the force of imagination alone. By controlling the activity of your hippocampus.
Rat studies that could benefit humans
Thus, the work of HHMI researchers shows that rats can control their hippocampal activity with precision and flexibility. As we humans can do it. Rats are also able to sustain this hippocampal activity, holding their thoughts in a given location for several seconds. Which may seem a very long time considering the idea – perhaps a little false in the end – that scientists have of the attention span of a rat.
Rats, therefore, like humans, possess a certain form of imagination. And that’s already crazy information in itself. But researchers go beyond that. Building on this success, they hope to be able to exploit their “thought detector” to design new prosthetic devices.
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