Researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus have found that animals also possess an imagination. The researchers developed a novel system combining virtual reality and a brain-machine interface to probe the rat’s inner thoughts. They found that like humans, animals too can control their brain activity to imagine 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. Like humans, when rodents experience places and events, specific neural activity patterns are activated in the hippocampus, an area of the brain responsible for spatial memory. The new study finds rats can voluntarily generate these same activity patterns and do so to recall remote locations distant from their current position. This ability to imagine locations away from one’s current position is fundamental to remembering past events and imagining possible future scenarios.
