December 6, 2023

Janessa Angela Alerre

10th Grade

George Washington High School

Humans use their imagination to visualize potential outcomes or situations daily. For instance, we imagine how our presentation will go, how the next day will begin, how a home-cooked meal will taste, and much more. However, rats, the pests roaming in society, were recently discovered using their imagination to move digital objects! But how did they identify this ability?

Researchers witnessed rats using their minds to navigate a virtual reality setting with an advanced gadget that monitors brain activity. Their investigation, published in Science, found that rats are capable of thinking about locations and items that are not directly in front of them. Thus, providing clues about how our minds imagine new situations whilst recalling past ones. 

Mayank Mehta, a neurophysicist at UCLA states, “This is fantastic research! It opens up a lot of exciting possibilities.” He further explains that having a better scientific understanding could contribute to the diagnosis and treatment of memory disorders. 

Our minds go back to the past by revisiting memories and using them to imagine new scenarios. Albert Lee, a neuroscientist, and his colleagues studied this idea. Lee states, “Mental time travel are part of what makes our inner mental lives quite rich and interesting.” He delves into this idea with a simple question, Can you be in one place and think about another place?

Rats were trained to move on a spherical treadmill while a 3-D virtual environment was projected onto a nearby screen by Albert Lee and colleagues, together with neuroscientist and engineer Chongxi Lai. As the rats strolled around in the virtual world, signals were recorded from nerve cells in the rats’ hippocampi, a brain structure that places memories into long-term storage. Through this, researchers were able to identify patterns that aligned with patterns of brain activity. However, researchers wanted to know more than this.

Therefore, they decided to test out if rats could imagine their way through society. First, they were taught to use solely their hippocampal brain activity patterns to mentally transfer a virtual cube to a twisted column. Consequently, the rats would receive water as payment if they successfully Jedied the cube. For this experiment, rats controlled the virtual reality world using their brains, and their motion on the treadmill were irrelevant. Based on this, researchers concluded that rats were skilled at these activities: As rats recalled the location of their awards, they were able to intentionally activate the place-specific neurons in their hippocampus. 

Neuroscientist Daoyun Ji of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston states that the results are “Strong evidence that rats can use imagination to perform novel, artificial tasks.” Although surprising, humans are not the only species who use their imagination. Rats, too, have demonstrated the ability to use their minds to predict a possible scenario or outcome! So, the next time you see a rat in your house, it’s probably imagining a possible escape route.