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Scientists Force Genetically Engineered Mouse to Watch Classic Film Noir
Scientists have built a brain observatory that monitors mouse brain activity [npr.org] in response to visual stimuli:
Letting mice watch Orson Welles movies may help scientists explain human consciousness. At least that's one premise of the Allen Brain Observatory [brain-map.org], which launched Wednesday and lets anyone with an Internet connection study a mouse brain as it responds to visual information.
"Think of it as a telescope, but a telescope that is looking at the brain," says Christof Koch [alleninstitute.org], chief scientific officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, which created the observatory.
[...] There's no easy way to study a person's brain as it makes sense of visual information. So the observatory has been gathering huge amounts of data on mice, which have a visual system that is very similar to the one found in people. The data come from mice that run on a wheel as still images and movies appear on a screen in front of them. For the mice, it's a lot like watching TV on a treadmill at the gym.
But these mice have been genetically altered in a way that allows a computer to monitor the activity of about 18,000 neurons as they respond to different images. "We can look at those neurons and from that decode literally what goes through the mind of the mouse," Koch says. Those neurons were pretty active when the mice watched the first few minutes of Orson Welles' film noir classic Touch of Evil. The film is good for mouse experiments because "It's black and white and it has nice contrasts and it has a long shot without having many interruptions," Koch says.
At one point, the camera follows a couple through the streets of a Mexican border town. As a mouse watches the action [brain-map.org], its brain activity changes in response to the images. For example, brain cells that respond to vertical lines start firing as the couple moves past a building with vertical columns. That response is just one tiny part of the brain system that allows a mouse to create an internal map of its world. Other experiments show which brain cells fire when a mouse recognizes another animal, like a butterfly.
