Researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Boston, United States, have succeeded in demonstrating that rats are capable of imagination. This study could lead to high-level neural prostheses.
This is an important discovery, which will perhaps help to challenge preconceived ideas, fears and fantasies about rats. After the publication, on Thursday, November 2, of a study in the very serious journal Sciencewhich proves the capacity of rats to show imagination, they are in the spotlight in several major newspapers at the beginning of November, such as the Guardian, the Washington Post and the magazine Newsweek.
Move through imagination
To reach this conclusion, researchers placed rats in a virtual reality arena, after implanting electrodes in their brains. They then placed them on a conveyor belt with a goal to achieve. The researchers then removed the treadmill and observed what was happening in the hippocampus, the seat of memory, the internal GPS of the rats’ brains (and ours).
Scientists discovered that rats could, through the power of their thoughts alone, navigate their environment, teleport through thought, just like we do when we imagine ourselves in our house, and visualize the location of rooms, furniture, that we move mentally through places we know. “Rats could maintain a hippocampal representation of a distant location for tens of seconds, reminiscent of human imagination or mental time travel”we can read in the summary of the study on the Science magazine website.
Checking a mind map
That’s not all, the researchers also managed to prove that rats were capable of moving an object on the virtual reality screen, towards a particular goal, again, by their cerebral activity alone. This discovery is a world first. As the Washington Post recalls: if already in 1948, a researcher had hypothesized that rats had an internal map of their environment, no one had succeeded in demonstrating that they could really control this map. It’s done : “This discovery provides a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying episodic memory recall, mental simulation and planning, and imagination. It paves the way for high-level neural prosthetics that utilize hippocampal representations.”
And since, according to Albert Einstein, “Imagination is more important than knowledge”it will perhaps also one day reconcile men and rats.