Maybe it’s not exactly inception…but a new study from MIT researchers suggests that it is possible to manipulate the dreams of sleeping rats. And surprisingly, it isn’t really all that difficult. During the day, the researchers had the rats run through a maze while audio cues pointed them in the right direction. One tone indicated that a left turn would yield a treat while a different tone told the rats that they would find food if they turned right. While the rats ran the maze, the researchers recorded their neural activity.

When the rats went to sleep, the researchers again observed their brain activity. Scientists have known for many years that the hippocampus replays the day’s events during sleep in order to consolidate newly-formed memories. The team at MIT watched the brain activity of the rats and confirmed that they were dreaming of the mazes they had run earlier that day. The question they needed answered: could they control the rats’ dreams by means of some type of external stimulation?

To find out, they played the same audio cues from the maze while the rats were dreaming. And by again observing the rats’ neural activity, the researchers were able to see that playing the audio cues caused the rats to begin dreaming of the areas of the maze associated with those sounds. In effect, the researchers were steering the dreams of the sleeping rats. Although the researchers say that their project will help science develop new, improved ways of processing new memories, we know the truth: they want to be pirates in their sleep.

The post Ratception: Scientists Successfully Manipulate Rats’ Dreams first appeared on Gajitz.

For many years, we humans have assumed that only “higher” primates could feel and express empathy. But a new experiment from the University of Chicago suggests that even rats feel the tug of kinship when they see a friend in trouble. The experiment centered on separating two rat “friends” who usually share a cage by locking one up in a small chamber. The other rat had the power to open the chamber and let the detainee out – and it surprisingly did so even when there was no reward involved.

The scientists tried a number of setups to identify exactly what was motivating the free rats to let their friends out of the restraint chamber. They removed any type of reward, including socialization with the other rat; they put empty restraint chambers in the cage to see if the rats were opening it just because they were curious about it. They even gave the free rat the choice between eating chocolate alone and freeing its friend. More than half of the time, the rat chose to open the restraint chamber and share the chocolate with its friend, suggesting the first real signs of rodent empathy and social behavior.

The rats weren’t trained before beginning the experiment, but they quickly learned several ways to open the restraint chamber door. In the initial runs of the experiment, both the free and restrained rats were startled by the opening door. In subsequent runs, they clearly knew how to achieve the result and did it on purpose. They seemed to understand exactly how to help their trapped friends and performed complex actions to do so, over and over.

The post Warm Rodents? Rats Free Friends Rather Than Snack Alone first appeared on Gajitz.