2023-10-11 04:00:07
A recent study reveals that the most basic animals such as worms feel emotions similar to ours, such as fear in particular.
Image d’illustration Pixabay
Researchers from Northeastern University in the United States and Nagoya City University (Nagoya (????; -shi) is the fourth largest and third most prosperous city in…) in Japan, carried out an experiment on a Caenorhabditis elegans nematode (Caenorhabditis elegans is a nematode of the Rhabditidae family. It is an organism…), a worm (Worms constitute a very heterogeneous group of invertebrate animals…) most fundamental of the animal kingdom (An animal (from the Latin animus, spirit, or vital principle) is, according to the classical classification, a…), measuring approximately 1 millimeter. This animal has neither a brain (The brain is the main organ of the central nervous system of animals. The brain processes…), nor eyes, nor even a spine (The spine, or spine, is a stack of articulated bones called…), and is neither equipped with the sense (SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) is a scientific project which aims…) of sight (Sight is the sense which allows to observe and analyze the environment through reception and…) nor that of smell. This experiment consisted of subjecting the animal to brief electrical shocks in order to analyze its behavior followingwards. Result: when the worm was stimulated by an electric shock lasting a few seconds, it then began to move at an unusually high speed, and this “escape” continued for two minutes (First form of a document: Law: one minute is the original of an act. …) following the shock. This “emotional” state would be regulated by neurons located in his nervous system (The nervous system is a network system made up of sense organs,…).
The team was also able to observe that when the animal felt this “emotion”, it ignored the food placed nearby even though food is a priority for this species. The animal thus favored fleeing to find safety, ignoring its own usual priorities.
This behavioral response was observed with variable intensity and duration depending on the shock administered. The persistence of this behavior as well as its intensity depending on the shock led the teams to conclude that this brain state would be similar to fear. Indeed, the three characteristics defining an animal emotion were united here, namely persistence, evolvability and valence (emotional value associated with a stimulus).
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#Worms #feel #emotions #fear
