Take a look at this video, it’s the brain of a mouse who explores an arena and you can see neurons in its brain flash green when it recognizes a familiar spot.
This new Stanford research learns us that all it takes if you want to read a mouse’s mind, is some fluorescent protein and a tiny microscope implanted in the rodent’s head.
From the press release:
“We can literally figure out where the mouse is in the arena by looking at these lights,” said Mark Schnitzer, an associate professor of biology and of applied physics and the senior author on the paper, recently published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
When a mouse is scratching at the wall in a certain area of the arena, a specific neuron will fire and flash green. When the mouse scampers to a different area, the light from the first neuron fades and a new cell sparks up.
“The hippocampus is very sensitive to where the animal is in its environment, and different cells respond to different parts of the arena,” Schnitzer said. “Imagine walking around your office. Some of the neurons in your hippocampus light up when you’re near your desk, and others fire when you’re near your chair. This is how your brain makes a representative map of a space.”
The group has found that a mouse’s neurons fire in the same patterns even when a month has passed between experiments. “The ability to come back and observe the same cells is very important for studying progressive brain diseases,” Schnitzer said.
For example, if a particular neuron in a test mouse stops functioning, as a result of normal neuronal death or a neurodegenerative disease, researchers could apply an experimental therapeutic agent and then expose the mouse to the same stimuli to see if the neuron’s function returns.
Although the technology can’t be used on humans, mouse models are a common starting point for new therapies for human neurodegenerative diseases, and Schnitzer believes the system could be a very useful tool in evaluating pre-clinical research.
Abstract of the research published in Nature:
Using Ca2+ imaging in freely behaving mice that repeatedly explored a familiar environment, we tracked thousands of CA1 pyramidal cells’ place fields over weeks. Place coding was dynamic, as each day the ensemble representation of this environment involved a unique subset of cells. However, cells in the ~15–25% overlap between any two of these subsets retained the same place fields, which sufficed to preserve an accurate spatial representation across weeks.