No.24432
For the anons that don't want to click on links:
>Headline: Rats have an imagination, new research finds
>A team from the Lee and Harris labs developed a novel system combining virtual reality and a brain-machine interface to probe a rat's inner thoughts.
>They found that, like humans, animals can think about places and objects that aren't right in front of them, using their thoughts to imagine walking to a location or moving a remote object to a specific spot.
>The project began nine years ago when Lai arrived at Janelia as a graduate student with an idea to test whether an animal could think.
>the labs worked to develop a system to understand what animals are thinking, a real-time "thought detector" that could measure neural activity and translate what it meant.
>Once they developed their system, the researchers had to create the "thought dictionary" that would allow them to decode the rat's brain signals. This dictionary compiles what activity patterns look like when the rat experiences something—in this case, places in the VR arena.
>In the second task, the "Jedi" task, the rat moves an object to a location by thoughts alone. The rat is fixed in a virtual place but "moves" an object to a goal in the VR space by controlling its hippocampal activity. […] The researchers then changed the location of the goal, requiring the animal to produce activity patterns associated with the new location.
>The team found that rats can precisely and flexibly control their hippocampal activity, in the same way humans likely do.
Honestly, this experiment was probably just to confirm the hypothesis that, yes, Rats can imagine stuff and think. and it doesn't sound like the rats were permanently attached to this prison. just that it was tasked to do things in a virtual setting and left the arena when testing was done.
Personally, I find it odd that we had to confirm this, but I guess now we know.
>Do yu think they are doing this to humans in China?
no lol. they are doing much more horrible things than this to humans. and not for the pursuit of knowledge.
