Have you ever wondered if animals can daydream or imagine things the way we do?
Well, scientists have some exciting news – it turns out that rats may have imaginations, too!
Researchers at the Janelia Research Campus have been working hard to find out what goes on inside a rat’s brain. And guess what?
They’ve discovered that rats can think about places or things that aren’t right there in front of them. They can even imagine walking to different spots or moving things around with their minds.
Here’s how the scientists found this out: they built a special kind of virtual reality system that connects directly to a rat’s brain.
This setup helped them peek into what the rat is thinking by looking at patterns of brain activity.
In our brains, there’s a part called the hippocampus that helps us remember where things are and imagine different places.
Rats have this part in their brains too, and it lights up with activity when they remember or think about locations.
The lead scientist, Chongxi Lai, with the help of his advisors Tim Harris and Albert Lee, created a system that could really understand rat thoughts.
They used something called a brain-machine interface (BMI) that can read the signals from the rat’s brain and link them to a computer.
The rats were put into a virtual reality arena that showed them a 360-degree world, and they could move around in it by walking on a kind of treadmill.
When the rats moved to certain places in this virtual world, their hippocampus would create specific patterns of brain activity. The scientists recorded these patterns to create a “thought dictionary,” which would help them understand what each brain pattern meant.
Next, the researchers tried something super cool. They stopped the rats from moving in the virtual world and asked them to just think about going to a place instead.
When the rats thought about the place they wanted to go, their brain activity matched the patterns from the thought dictionary. It was as if they were using their imagination to “walk” to the goal in their mind.
The tasks the rats did were named after movies and books to make them fun. In the “Jumper” task, the rat had to imagine going to a place to get a treat, and in the “Jedi” task, the rat had to move something to a spot using only its thoughts.
The scientists were amazed to see that rats could focus their thoughts on one place for a long time. They could even change their thoughts to new places when the goal was moved. This shows that rats might have the same kind of attention we thought only humans had.
Tim Harris pointed out how surprising it was to see rats could think so hard and for so long. And because the rats could control their brain activity so well, the scientists think this might help us make better tools for people who need help, like those using prosthetic limbs.
All of this exciting rat imagination research was published in a famous science magazine called Science.
It’s a big deal because it not only shows us that animals might be more like us than we thought, but it also could help people in the future with the information it provides about the brain.
So, the next time you see a rat, just remember – it might be daydreaming about its own little adventures!
Follow us on Twitter for more articles about this topic.
Source: KSR.
