First Brain-Wide Map of Decision-Making Charted In Mice (eurekalert.org) 12
In a landmark collaboration across 22 labs, neuroscientists have created the first brain-wide map of decision-making in mice, tracking over 620,000 neurons across nearly 280 brain regions. They found that decision-making is distributed much more broadly than previously thought, involving not just "cognitive" centers but also regions linked to movement. From a report: The task was deceptively simple task. Mice sat in front of a screen that intermittently displayed a black-and-white striped circle for a brief amount of time on either the left or right side. A mouse could earn a sip of sugar water if they quickly moved the circle toward the center of the screen by operating a tiny steering wheel in the same direction, often doing so within one second. On some trials, the circle was faint, requiring the animal to rely on past experience to make a guess, which allowed researchers to study how expectations influence future decisions. While the mice performed the task, researchers recorded brain activity using high-density electrodes that allowed them to monitor hundreds of neurons across many regions simultaneously. The work was divided across the participating labs, so that each lab mapped a particular region of the mouse brain. The pooled dataset covers 620,000 neurons recorded from 139 mice in 12 labs, encompassing nearly the entire brain. The resulting map revealed that decision-making activity is distributed across the brain, including in areas traditionally associated with movement rather than cognition. The findings have been published in two papers in the journal Nature.
Long Time Coming (Score:2)
"We've been working on this for 42 years", said the principal investigator.
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Decisions, decisions (Score:3)
I'd like it if they could explain why my mice always click on certain sites, even though they just come up nowadays saying: "This web site is not available in your state due to recent laws that we feel violate your privacy. Contact your state legislators to repeal these restrictions on your right for adults to view adult content."
Those naughty, naughty mice and their little flowcharts!
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They were too busy mousing around.
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You mean mouses, not mice. /s I do know a mouse that uses mouses though. I should ask him.
Real AI (Score:4, Interesting)
If we ever want to understand how our own intelligence works and possibly develop actual AI, research like this is the way to do this. It's complicated and if we ever get there, will take a very long time, quite possibly centuries (if advanced industrial civilization doesn't collapse by that point). My understanding is, biological systems are very messy and haphazard in their design, and that's the only way something that came about as a result of random mutations could be. Systems that control intelligence clearly seem to be no exception, even for relatively simple intelligence like that of mice. But that's the only way to get there.
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50% of the industry disagrees with you.
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Could not agree more. There are so many behaviors that we assume are human only - altruism, empathy both within and beyond own species, jealousy - that have been observed in other species. Understanding what "thought" means, how decisions are taken etc. are going to be incredibly important. To your point, there seems to have been some really messy evolution that ended up in what passes for intelligence in humans.
I love the "3 laws of robotics" as a framework for recognizing that some of these must be built
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"haphazard in their design"? There is no 'design', more like 'haphazard in their nature" or rather "haphazard as a result of the process of evolution" but yeah understanding how it work requires a lot of such experiments.
However, the AI better be less messy. I hope we can do better here with the 'design'. But in any case it's going to be an Alien Intelligence rather than Artificial (human) Intelligence.
Meanwhile, in AI Directed Drones– (Score:2)
[3 mice escape with tiny parachutes while drone continues it's flight into an enemy position]