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Scientists Use Quake 2 To Study the Brains of Mice

Posted by Soulskill on from the god-help-us-if-they-learn-how-to-rocket-jump dept.

An anonymous reader writes "In this week's issue of Nature, scientists from Princeton University trained mice to navigate around a virtual environment using a setup that resembles a combination of a giant trackball and a mini-iMax theater displaying a virtual world rendered using a modified version of the Quake 2 open source game engine. (Here's the academic paper, subscription required.) They hold the mouse's head still atop a giant trackball, which the mouse turns by running. The scientists use the rotations to move the mouse around in the virtual environment, and when he reaches certain places, he gets a reward. Because they are able to hold the head still, they can stick microscopic glass electrodes into individual neurons in the hippocampus of this mouse as it 'navigates.' They find the neural activity that resembles activity during real life navigation, and learned new things about the inputs and computations that are going on inside these neurons, which weren't known before. No word as of yet whether the scientists plan on giving the mice control of the gun. Wonder whether John Carmack ever envisioned this when he opened up the Quake code?"

5 of 185 comments (clear)

  1. What are we going to do today, Brain? by Jeremi · · Score: 3, Informative
    1. Train mice on Quake 2 until they are really good at it
    2. Outfit mice with miniature rocket launchers and rail guns
    3. Turn the armed mice loose
    4. Rule the world!
    --


    I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
    1. Re:What are we going to do today, Brain? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      Are you pondering what I'm pondering?

  2. Ideas by lymond01 · · Score: 2, Informative

    No word as of yet whether the scientists plan on giving the mice control of the gun.

    Just whisper this when you say it. Rodents have unnaturally good hearing.

  3. Re:Quake Fit? by hoggoth · · Score: 2, Informative

    You can.

    See here: http://www.virtusphere.com/

    DO WANT.

    --
    - For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat /dev/random (may take some time)
  4. Re:They're waiting for you. In the TEST CHAMBER. by megamerican · · Score: 2, Informative

    Half-Life did use the Q2 engine.

    It actually used the Quake engine which was modified with some parts of the Quake2 codebase. The modified Quake engine was known as Quakeworld.

    http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Quake_Engine_Hierarchy

    --
    If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt