Armed with technologies to track a creature’s every move, neuroscientists are gaining insights into animal — and human — behaviour.
In a dimly lit laboratory in London, a brown mouse explores a circular tabletop, sniffing as it ambles about. Suddenly, silently, a shadow appears.
From the mouse’s perspective, this is life or death. But the shadow wasn’t cast by a predator. Instead, it is the work of neuroscientists in Tiago Branco’s lab, who have rigged up a plastic disc on a lever to provoke, and thereby study, the mouse’s escape behaviour. This is a rapid decision-making process thatBranco, a neuroscientist at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre at University College London, has wondered about installing a taxidermied owl on a zip wire to create a more realistic experience.
“Until we understand the brain basis of what goes on for individuals when they are experiencing symptoms, we’ll continue to not effectively serve them,” says Lisanby, who in the past year helped to launch more than US$25 million in funding for research to quantify natural behaviours in humans and other animals.
Some teams, such as Branco’s, are studying specific behaviours while recording brain activity using electrodes mounted on animals’ heads. Downstairs from his team’s fake-predator experiments, for instance, researchers at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre are tracking animals as they seek food. The team has built an arena with little wheels embedded in the floor. When a mouse digs at the wheels, cereal pellets pop out at a rate chosen by the scientists.
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