As long as we think it's an authentic human trait, we are always able to imagine things that never happened, you might imagine yourself passing an exam, you might get the Best Employee award, or you might imagine that you traveled to an Asian city you love. It's wide open.
But in a new study published in the journal Science led by scientists from the Howard Hughes Medical Foundation in the United States, it was found that mice also have the same trait, where they can imagine places and objects that are not directly in front of them.
To reach these findings, the researchers built an experiment involving virtual reality and brain-machine interface processes, the latter of which were electrodes surgically implanted in the brains of mice to determine exactly which areas of the brain were activated in a given context. The researchers prepared the following video for the first part of the experiment:
Mice that run
In the experiments, the mice were placed on a spherical treadmill, and then surrounded by a 360-degree virtual reality screen, and then a target was set for the mouse to reach it, and with the mouse moving, the virtual reality changes quickly to show the mouse as if the goal is approaching, so he thinks that he is in a real environment, and with reaching the goal, he gets a reward.
Meanwhile, the brain-machine interface plays an important role, examining which areas of the brain are activated during that task, and they appear to be specific neural networks in the hippocampus of the mouse brain. The researchers found that the set of neurons activated in the hippocampus area of the mouse brain was related to the mouse's movement in space.
After that, the researchers repeated the same experiment, but the virtual reality screen remained static and did not move to show the mouse that it was advancing to reach the goal and get the reward, and here was the surprise for scientists, as the same areas that are believed to be responsible for the movement of the mouse in the vacuum have been activated as well, which suggests that the mouse was not able to reach the goal, but imagined a future scenario that reaches the goal in it. The researchers prepared this video for the second part of the experiment:
Prosthetic devices
According to the study, the mice were able to control their hippocampus activity in a time frame similar to the time frame in which humans relive past events or imagine new scenarios.
In this context, the researchers were able in subsequent experiments to train mice to move within virtual reality, but only with their ideas and not with actual movement on the treadmill, so the mouse only had to think about moving left or right until the virtual reality moved according to its ideas.
According to an official press release from the Howard Hughes Medical Foundation, this could be useful in the future in developing the range of prosthetic devices, which humans can control with a degree of extreme precision just by thinking with their brains.
This is a field of research that is currently active, and a decade ago scientists have already developed artificial feet that the person using them can move based solely on their ideas, but this scope is still evolving day by day.