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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.
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.
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!
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
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!
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
Most creative thinkers already understand, at least intuitively, that the human brain will continue working on a problem even when a person is actively thinking about something else. How many programmers know that when you're beating your head against a problem, a good way to solve it is to go do something physical or repetitive, like play sports or video games or even sleep? Then when you come back, your brain has an answer for you, or at least has conceptualized the problem so you can get a better handle on it.
I don't know how much there is to officially back this up, but I think this is why OOP caught on so well, at least with some people. If you have a system made of interacting modular components, your brain doesn't have to conceptualize sections of some messy lines of ASM or C code... it can just use the constructs you've actually built into the system, so the "processing cost" of groking the system is much cheaper.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
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.
No, but when you die Netcraft confirms it.
the layman's guide to computer science
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.
You should perhaps read a book called Gödel Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter if you haven't already, which develops and expands that theory. It's *starting* to get a bit old at the moment but it's still absolutely fascinating.
The paper is available at Nature Advance Online Publications - if you have access.
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.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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.