mouse or rat A new study shows that humans can use their imaginations just like humans. This means that their thoughts are not always fixed on what’s in front of them, but can also move across time and space.
It’s something we do naturally, like moving to another place, remembering past events, or visualizing future scenarios in our minds. This seems to occur mainly in a part of the brain called a part of the brain. HippocampusAnd researchers are now showing similar activity in the hippocampus of rats.
A team at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) virtual reality (VR) in combination with a brain-machine interface to determine whether rodents can think about moving to a specific location to retrieve water rewards, even if they are not actually moving there.
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“Imagining is one of the great things humans can do.” To tell Albert Lee, neurologist at HHMI; “Now we’ve discovered that animals can do it too, and we’ve found a way to study it.”
Here’s how the experiment works: The researchers fitted rats with a custom brain-machine interface. their movements virtual reality Influence the environment through the “imagination” activity of the hippocampus. The rats were placed on a spherical treadmill, allowing them to move around in VR without actually leaving the same location.
As the rats ‘moved around’, their brain activity was monitored It was then translated into a personalized “thought dictionary” that links location in virtual reality to hippocampal activity.. This means that researchers can associate specific activity patterns with specific locations in virtual space, allowing them to see what’s inside the rat’s head.
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The setup was then tweaked so that physical movement on the treadmill did not affect the VR world. This forced the rats to intentionally and voluntarily imagine moving to a specific location to get water or moving an object to a specific location. Brain scans suggested that this was indeed what the rats were doing.
“Rats can certainly activate representations of places in their environment without having to go there.” To tell Chongxi Lai, a neuroscientist at HHMI, said:
“Even though his physical body is fixed, his spatial thinking can go to very far places.”
The reasoning goes that if the rat can imagine being somewhere else, it might imagine something in the future or remember something in the past, but what is going on in the animal’s mind? It remains difficult to be certain. This VR system may enable future research in this area.
Also noteworthy is the fact that the animals did not require much training to imagine moving through VR and were able to maintain mental activity for quite a long time, about 10 seconds.
“What’s surprising is how rats learn to think about that place rather than somewhere else for so long, based on perhaps naive ideas about rats’ attention spans.” To tell HHMI biochemist Timothy Harris.
This study science.