Slashdot Mirror
MIT Researchers Explore How Rats Think
Ant writes "A Nature News article explains that, after running a maze, rats mentally replay their actions backwards." From the article: "As the rats ran along the track, the nerve cells fired in a very specific sequence. This is not surprising, because certain cells in this region are known to be triggered when an animal passes through a particular spot in a space. But the researchers were taken aback by what they saw when the rats were resting. Then, the same brain cells replayed the sequence of electrical firing over and over, but in reverse and speeded up. 'It's absolutely original; no one has ever seen this before at all,' says Edvard Moser, who studies memory at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim."
If a rat knows the difference between a Stack and a Queue, you better start updating your resume.
There is truth in humor.
Not only do they think in dupes, but they get to see the dupes in reverse and twice the speed!
Task Mangler
Hmmmmm. Braaaaiiinnnsss.
There should be a "-1:Groupthink"
.gnitseretni yrev siht dnuof I
I for one welcome our backwards thinking, self destructive virus-laden overlords.
If this idea proves true in people, it could have many implications for human learning. It suggests that those idle times, perhaps spent gazing into space, are actually crucial for our brains to replay, and learn from, recent experiences.
Are dreams there only to help the learning process? Is there something more to them?
Sounds like it's a way of setting important memories. Being able to navigate a course is important to a rat's survival. It'd be interesting to see if this happens with all memories or just the most important for the rat to recall. Stress causes memories in humans to become more perminate. There was a study where people held their hand in ice cold water to see how it affected memory. The shock of the cold water increased retention dramatically. I'd be curious if the levels of stress hormones went up as well. Rerunning the memory may be a stress reaction to important information.
Evidence finally found to support conspiracy theorists' claims of rats plotting world domination.
mouthgaurds in we're shaking hands now!
Can they induce the maze path into the mouse?
Any teaching style that will appeal to a hyperactive child, will more than likely be engaging for a 'normal' student.
Though it might be a stretch to suggest this could be extended to understanding hyperactive kids. AFAIK, they usually have abnormally low levels of dopamine and/or seratonin in their brains, while the article posits that "The rerun [for mice] could coincide with a burst of the reward chemical dopamine, which is released in the brain when the animal finds food."
Maybe they can find some hyperactive mice to run the tests on?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
This reminds me of pushdown automata. Funny how everything in brain research seems to correllate to computer science. Could it be that the brain is a computer?
It's pretty simple, once they get the juice on someone, they squeal to the nearest narc.. obviously.
MABASPLOOM!
"It's absolutely original; no one has ever seen this before at all," says Edvard Moser.
Except for the rats, of course.
7h3$3 4r3n'7 7h3 Ðr01Ð$ ¥0 4r3 £00|{1n9 f0r. M0v3 4£0n9. --OB1
Pinky: Gee, Brain, what are we going to do tonight? Brain: The same thing we do every night, Pinky. Try to take over the world!
MIT is studying politicians. They use rats since the rats won't pick the scientist's when they turn their backs.
Fight Spammers!
The researchers found that some of the rats thought more about the maze than others. Here's a picture of two mice. The one on the left thought much more about his performance than the one on the right.
No Sigs!
This is possibly the dumbest thing that I have ever read.
An interesting observation I made when studying for bigger exams:
a) There are "key days", where I panic about not being able to learn stuff in time and those are the days when I remember/understand stuff far better than on self-confident days. On "panic days", I learn 3x-5x more effiently than on self-confident days.
b) I might study a whole day long and dont understand or at least not being able to explain the formulas/problems/algorithms/whatever in my own words. And then I panic. When I have gone to sleep and wake up the next morning, however, all is there, unfolds in my mind in its crystal clear glory.
Sometimes I remember the dreams of those nights being about formulas and exams.
=> combining this evidence with your post and the article, leads to two points:
- Stress prepares certain areas for reorganising newly acquired memories.
- These areas then replay and reorganise the newly acquired memories during the night. The dreams are about some of those informations/processes popping up into the (dream-)conscious realm and the consciousness processing elements try to make sense from the basic subconscious information that is currently learn/trained.
If you have dealt with Experience-Based Artificial Neural Networks (EBANN) - they also learn in that way. They have some formal background knowledge about a problem, acquired/given externally (with humans its e.g. prior knowledge about the domain or just basic logic) and then optimise a Neural Network for working on a generalised class of examples for that problem. The optimisation is lead/constraint by the background knowledge.
--- censored
Ouuuchh... my head hurts.. I wonder why those stupid humans had to stick all that metal into my head?!?!
I read this article twice and tried to come up with a good comment. But all that happened was that the words kept repeating themselves in my mind...
... and just think how many times you, my dear reader, will have to repeat this sentence in you mind. So stop resting and get back to work!
-:) Oh no - not again.
www.rednebula.com
Evidence finally found to support conspiracy theorists' claims of rats plotting world domination.
Plotting? They have already acieved it! the species is called Rattus Politicianus, you it infests senate, parlieamentary and other government buildings world wide. There is also a lesser species called Rattus Lawyeriensis it is usually found chasing after ambulances or monitoring peoples internet connections looking for evidence of illegal music downloads.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Haven't most people walked through the halls of a unfamiliar building to their destination then stopped and reviewed how to get back out a few times (a movie in reverse sorta) in order to get it in their long term memory? or is it just me? I don't always do it, just when the path seemed complicated. I'd think doing this would be much more important to a mouse considering they have rival creatures towering over them like downtown buildings.
Whoa, I'm reading back my post and thinking WTF!
Stop invalid scientific research. Ask your local scientists to feed their lab rats with a phytoestrogen-free chow.
Back when I was I kid there was a very good treatment for ADHD. You lack attention in school and your mother opens a large can of whoop-ass on you. Voila! You don't lack attention anymore (until your ass stops hurting at least). To me this seems like a better alternative to stuffing kids with psychotropic drugs.
You should read your own post(s) more often.
I'm sorry.
(Not really)
Thinking "backwards" always fucks me up. I get my directions flipped and just end up confusing myself even more. I've either got to start from a landmark of some sort, or right from the beginning and retrace my steps that way.
Though I guess its worth nothing that i'm also one of those people who sucks at reading the alphabet backwards. And if i'm ever quizzed on "what letter comes before..." I generally have to pick a 'landmark' string of letters ('lmnop' seems to be easiest, dont ask me why) and quickly run forwards from that point to figure it out. A lot of my navigation, be it physical or statistical, tends to be like that. Doing the whole random access thing just tends to be difficult for me, i'm much better with patterns and comparisons. It's not too suprising to me though, i've always been a better artist than a mathimatician - and I sure love my video games.
I think some peoples brains just function differently. I don't know why really... maybe its genetics, maybe its stimuli, maybe its all just completely random. And if there ever comes a day when we DO know for sure, im going to be very very excited, and very VERY scared.
overlords rat thinking backwards new out welcome, one for I.
can we get the Toxoplasma to change their 'memories'?
Why bother what they thinking anyway? Even us (human @ homosapien) can't think what others think..they need to research that. After all the test and research using them as the test object?
If dreams are like movies then memories are films about ghost..
Yeah... but do they store big endian or little endian?
Dominos Pizza will be hiring rats as delivery drivers. after i made a delivery and arrived at the destination, i used the same techniques as the rats use! i would literally replay the course backwards in my head, reversing all the turns, etc (while smoking a bowl). after a few months in that "profession", i could go into any new city and keep my bearings easily. since i am amazed by the powers and skills of many animals and insects, i am honored to know i can compete with a rat!
i disable sigs
The result is also of keen interest to those who study artificial intelligence and try to teach computer systems or robots to learn through reward and punishment. Some such systems already work by playing back a sequence of moves so that the computer can identify at which point it made the trial or error.
It's called back propagation learning The algortihm is based on the error propagation backwards from the output nodes to the inner nodes of neural net.
Sounds like a lovely way to learn how actions lead to rewards without the complications of the actor-critic approach. I'd like to see whether this learning is able to propagate the rewards backwards in a way that allows a change in reward to affect actions. At the same time, I'd like to know whether this can be used to learn the continuous dependence of the final rewards on the actions chosen. Finally, I'd like to know whether this reversal is more general--that is, can plans be reversed? If so, it provides a general learning mechanism for causation.
thats one more thing to add to Wiki on /. subculture, aye?
wouldn't it make more sense to study the moose?
I'm a rabbit startled by the headlights of life
The only reason to do temporally reverse processing is, of course, error back propagation. The rat's logic and sensory data does not match 100%, and the difference is stored into special locations for later processing. When resting, rat uses this data, back propagates it through its network and adjusts the synaptic weights (weighted by the gradient of the neural responce) to obtain maximal behavioral change with minimal synaptic changes, ensuring locality of the behavior change. This is so obvious that I wonder that it ever hit the news. ;-)
-- Imperial units must die --
how about investigating wall street?
The paper is available at Nature Advance Online Publications - if you have access.
Teachers need to learn from entertainers and stand up comedians,
be interesting or be ignored.
How many times have you had to sit through a class listening to someone drone on about
a topic you don't really care about?
I don't think more and more kids are 'catching' ADD (and require expensive drugs from pharma companies for the rest of their natural life...)
I think the quality of teaching in the USA needs improvement, as well as the quality of parenting.
Children used to behave out of love, respect or fear, but now they seem more out of control...
Oh okay gotta turn left,gotta turn left ..... nope maybe it was right, yep right it was right ..... this looks familiar. Ok two lefts now and then a another right ..... oh yeah, now i can smell it. Just a little bit further .... a quarter turn left followed by a hard 180 degree right .... I can totally taste it now!! Here i come .... just a few more turns and that sweet reward is mine!!
I don't even care that this is the fourth time this morning, this never gets old. I wouldn't mind a glass of milk though, could someone hook a brother up???
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
I wonder if this will help me retain what I've read?
?read I've what retain me help will this if wonder I
Nah, sounds like Yoda talking.
Of course, it doesn't take a MIT researcher to figure that out, just funding and identification that's it should be important.
Data != information, data exploitation == information.
It seems like this could be the next step in reading minds, sorta. There have been stories about the new advanced lie detectors "reading your mind" in a way already. If they can nail down what is going on during those nerve replays, it would really just be a matter of getting a person to trigger those replays in their minds and record them. Granted, I think this is probably a long way off, but you know someone with the knowhow is probably already thinking the same thing. This could also have interesting applications beyond the invasiveness, imagine being able to recording your memories that you had when your first child was born and showing it to them when they grow up. Or replaying the first time you met your significant other, etc. Hallmark is going to make a fortune!
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
The real goal of these experiments: How women think.
With the dating and the lipstick and the slaps in the face, hoy-vn-fra-gn!
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
The studies seem to be quite comprehensive and even may shed some light on a rat variant that is pervasive in Washington state. But it is known that those rats are a bit more deceptive and may be able to escape the spotlight in these studies.
I don't think that this study will produce the quality of results we expect in the existing studies that are ongoing. All it will do is confirm what they already have exposed.
Artifical Intelligience is no match for natural stupidity.
1) Find cheese
2) Eat
3) Reproduce
4) Find burrow and Sleep
5) Return to procedure 1)
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Poetry like, say, "Shed Reading (Rattus Norvegicus)" by Black Flag, in which an expressive rat bemoans his fate.
This sig, aah-ah, is comin' like a ghost-sig...
Just a little spot on Monday morning humour...
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Im to expert in neural networks but don't they use a technique called back propagation for refineing the connection between nodes... it seems to me that these rats brains must be using a similar technique? Does anyone know if research like this is being used to better neural nets in AI?
This is not true. It has been known for years that humans learn language 'backwards'. The classic example is children who first say "nana" before "banana". I'm surprised someone in the field doesn't have other examples readily at hand.
It is an interesting study though.
Benny Hill was unavailable for comment.
I do that too - after going through a junction, look back and see which direction to take (two adjacent T-junctions with staircases are probably the hardest).
I've also noticed that when taking a new route for the first time, such as finding a room in a campus build never visited before, the outgoing path always seems twice as long as the return path.
There was an article about how London taxi drivers had larger hippocampi regions>/a> when compared to non-taxi drivers.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Sorry boys, But I have been studying Neuroscience for the last 3 years. Every lecture we have had on sleep, particullary REM, has taught that when you are sleeping your neurons will all re-fire in an organized manner. This is when your memories are "consolidated" from semi-long term to long term memories. This is why if you have had a particularly stressful day you can "re-live" that day in your dreams. However it has long been shown that "place cells" or neurons that store spatial location will fire in the direct same sequence in which they fired when the test subject was presented with a spatial puzzle. You can read about this in the book Neuroscience by Kandal.
a) researchers wired some rats and made them run up and down a straight run and watched some nerve cells fire;
b) researchers saw the same nerve cells activate in reverse order while the rats rested;
c) researchers speculate either wildly or obviously that the rats are replaying the event and that maybe the rats are mentally replaying the run, and that maybe it would be the same in a maze, and maybe this coincides with dopamine release (not observed or measured), and that if maybe that were so, it would maybe tell us something about memory.
d) researchers are thrilled because this has never been seen before and is what they would expect.
Now what the hell is that? Seeing an as yet unexplained, and previously unexpected, phenomenon and declaring it coincides with expectations based on speculation?
Perhaps the story started off as simply about a new technique that allowed monitoring of individual nerve cells (which is news worthy) and got embellished by the media who couldn't see the value of it.
The conclusion:
"It suggests that those idle times, perhaps spent gazing into space, are actually crucial for our brains to replay, and learn from, recent experiences."
is banal in the extreme. Sports psychologists, for example, call the process "visualization" and it has been a training technique for decades.
A sad commentary on science reporting no matter how you look at it.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
I suspect there are different mechanisms at play here.
This is morking with a documented phenomena with rats whereby they will take the same route to/from a location over and over, moreso than most other critters.
It sounds like this goes some way to dexcribing the mechanism of how rats learn those routes and can repeat them. While, obviously, it offers insights into the brain mechanics, it sounds like it is describing a specific rat-adaptation and behaviour. This is probably a mechanism to reinforce routes which bring them to food.
The rat may not be 'consciously' replaying the events, but it might be hard-wired to recall these things as a survival trait.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Why would it be suprising to a memory researcher to 'discover' this?
It's an old problem (you do remember what Socrates was accused of, don't you?) that people who grow up idealize their behavior as kids (and the behavior of their contemporaries), and then blame the current generation for not matching their (false) memories. If you don't think this means you, watch the movie "Blackboard Jungle"* about kids in the 1950's (or find some movie made contemporaneous that DOESN'T idealize kids).
"Blackboard Jungle" was a "Be afraid! The kids are revolting!" movie. It's no more realistic than the idealizing movies. OTOH, I heard from my parents that one of the teachers at the school (combined high school & junior high) always carried a hammer with him to defend himself in case he was mobbed by kids. But I heard it from my parents after we'd left the area, not other kids. *I* thought things were normal and peaceful.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Why would it be suprising to a memory researcher to 'discover' this?
...always trying to get back to the cheese(unapologetic, anti-competitive, monopoly position).
"MIT Researchers Explore How Rats Think"
The people in the White House are upset over the invasion of privacy!
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
If I'm wandering around an area thats new to me, ok I usually get lost, but before then I am physically retracing my steps in reverse. I follow the familiar landmarks, buildings whatever as i return to my starting point. I don't see whats so astounding that another animal would be hardwired to follow a simialar process to retrace its steps. I mean the rat probably has much more difficultly with visualizing a maze as a whole, it would be wasting its time thinking about how it got to every single point in its journey when it could use some inbuilt hardwiring to automatically learn the return journey. The return journey is the most important one for the rat to learn anyway.
So, we now know that rats can think.
But why test rats? It's way more important to know if politicians and higher management types can think. Is this feat within their reach? Or are they, as we unscientifically suspect, completely braindead?
Inquiring minds want to know!
The moon is not fully subjugated. I demand a second assault wave preceded by a massive nuclear bombardment.
"Rats"? I'll thank you not to refer to Princeton that way.
Definitely one of the ways to memorize a location but probably a primitive one.
Most humans are used to seeing and reading maps (taught in school all over the world) and as such probably are familiar with the concept of visualising a location at least in 2D. The natural choice for most people would not be to think of a location as a sequence of paths, but as a relationship of the surroundings from where the path can be devised or even guessed. This might explain why we can enter an unfamiliar building or territory from one location and leave by another.
When faced with a maze though, people do tend to memorize a sequence and at best can "trace" out a known path or worse, get completely lost. Those who do solve mazes usually do it by a mental map. Humans may not be the only animals to be able to do this though (tigers are known to be quite "intelligent").
Can game developers comment on this?
They don't really think so much as they run for office.
My bet is they're trying to figure out what the Prime Minister of Australia will do next.
Well, duh, how else are they supposed to know how to get out?
Lewis Carroll said it best...
`I don't understand you,' said Alice. `It's dreadfully confusing!'
`That's the effect of living backwards,' the Queen said kindly: `it always makes one a little giddy at first --'
`Living backwards!' Alice repeated in great astonishment. `I never heard of such a thing!'
`-- but there's one great advantage in it, that one's memory works both ways.'
`I'm sure mine only works one way,' Alice remarked. `I can't remember things before they happen.'
`It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,' the Queen remarked.
-Through The Looking Glass, Chapter 5
OK, lets think about this.
A rat in the real world (e.g. my shed) routinely goes out from where it lives to scavenge food. This creature has a home base and returns there. From an evolutionary point of view I imagine there would be strong selection pressures to be able to return to it's home and not get lost and end up with the neighbours cat. As such, when the rat gets to the food it's brain would want to be primed for the return trip, which is most likely in recent memory and not committed to long term memory. Going over something again in the *reverse* order would be a method for planning the return trip and ensuring it is not forgotten until needed. If it was simple reinforcement for standard learning the rat wouldn't be doing it in reverse, it would be doing it in the order it first occured. As it is more difficult to learn something (even temporalily) in reverse then the *reverse* aspect of the learning would seem to be the important bit if the brain is going to the extra effort to do it, not just the 'rat goes over what it has learnt' bit.
Maybe not so useful for people unless you reverse learn where you parked your car in the lot to find it again??
Shit, when is science going to figure out how *women* think?
It's called "introspection."