By studying these natural actions, scientists are hoping to glean lessons about the brain and behaviour that are more holistic and more relevant to everyday activity than ever before.
They are “critical to survival, and under selective pressure”, she says. Meanwhile, many behaviours that come naturally - such as escaping a predator, or finding scarce food or a receptive mate - are extremely important for the animal, says Ann Kennedy, a theoretical neuroscientist at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois. Mice didn’t evolve to operate a joystick. The end result, Branco says, is like studying a “professional athlete” the brain might work differently in the messy, unpredictable real world. But they take days to months of training an animal to complete specific, idiosyncratic tasks. Such exercises - training an animal to use a lever or joystick to get a reward, for example, or watching it swim through a water maze - have established important principles of brain activity and organization. The set-up is part of a growing movement to step away from some of the lab experiments that neuroscientists have used for decades to understand the brain and behaviour. (The ‘predator’ shadow has been enhanced for visibility). Scientists evoke the escape response in a mouse. “Having drones - that would also be very nice,” says Dario Campagner, a researcher in Branco’s lab. And his colleagues have more ideas - cutting the disc into a wingspan shape, for instance. This is a rapid decision-making process that draws on sensory information, previous experience and instinct.īranco, 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.
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. But the shadow wasn’t cast by a predator. Neurons in its midbrain start to fire, sensing the threat of a potential predator, and a cascade of activity in an adjacent region orders its body to choose a response - freeze to the spot in the hope of going undetected, or run for shelter, in this case a red acetate box stationed nearby.įrom the mouse’s perspective, this is life or death. In a split second, the mouse’s brain whirs with activity. In a dimly lit laboratory in London, a brown mouse explores a circular tabletop, sniffing as it ambles about.
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