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."

ok. just johnny hold on

[Anonymous Coward]

mouthgaurds in we're shaking hands now!
Can they induce the maze path into the mouse?

the learning possibilities

[TubeSteak]

The discovery could also help to explain why people tend to learn a new task quicker when they take short rests between each practice round. It suggests that eliminating such breaks could actually interfere with learning, and perhaps even explain why hyperactive children often have learning difficulties.

This may be less about ADD/ADHD kids than about teaching style in general.

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?

Stress & studying for exams

[eMago]

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.

I suspect they will find the same true for people

[icecow]

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!

And nobody has asked...

[satcomdaddy1]

can we get the Toxoplasma [slashdot.org] to change their 'memories'?

common trait

[recharged95]

Most animals are path oriented. Could be why cats & dogs can find their way 'home'. When taking our cats for a walk (yes, on a leash) into a new area, they always stay on a path. If we turn around, they pull us towards that same route back to the car (cause they want to go home...). And when they walk back appear more confident in stride. Considering rats are more intelligent, this theory does have traction.

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.

Re:back propagation learning algorithm

[pclminion]

I very much doubt that a biological brain works in AT ALL the same manner. Information in biological neural nets appears to be pulse and time coded, whereas a feedforward network operates independently of time and processes real-valued signals, not discrete activations. In fact, once trained, a feedforward network corresponds exactly to a nonlinear, continuous, differentiable function.

The biological brain is not just a function.