[Music]
hello and welcome to technically speaking where scientists and Engineers come together to chat about common interest share knowledge and satisfy some curiosity I'm Antonia and I'm joined by Laura and Ellie to talk about rats and behavioral studies that involve them so Laura you used to keep rats and you are a scientist did you ever mix the two did I ever experiment on my pet rats I'm yes I did actually knew it I knew it I read that rats like to learn and they're quite smart right was one of
the reasons I got them so I basically looked up all these videos of people teaching their rats to do things and tried to teach them the same tricks and they were good at some and they wenten to good at others so their entire life was one big experiment of what can you do I think that's nice that's enrichment exactly is that an experiment or is that just training well I suppose part of it was experimenting on how good I am as a trainer as well so so it was a bit of
both I was terrible at teaching them fetch fetch can rats play fetch that's so cute apparently yeah but I taught them to operate pulley and do various things to find food and they come and sit on my shoulder and ride around on it they must have enjoyed it that seems quite Advanced I'm impressed that's just like two steps away from ratou they next needed to know how to cook and then they would have pulled your hair and in different directions while sat on your
shoulder and boom Ratatouille yeah Groot did used to sort of sit on the edge of the sofa and be like I want to go over there can you just pick me up please and I did so a I like that you knew what he wanted as well of course spent far too much time with him oh that's play so Ellie you're a zoologist with a science writing career you must have seen quite a few studies on animal behavior especially rats I think rats come up a lot both in studies on animal behavior
but also studies on like medical things like they're always the go-to lab subject so it's quite interesting to see what they are capable of and whether animals in a lab behave differently to wild rats there's far less studies I think or that I've come across myself on like wild rap Behavior so some of these studies that we're going to talk about are pretty unusual and not something that you would ever really come across rats doing in the wild and Laura's laughing because she knows what's in
store and I've studied as psychology so I understand a little bit about Behavioral Studies but that that's mostly on humans it'll be interesting to see what we find in terms of studies on rats and their behavior and something that inspired this episode was the study about rats having imagination yeah so this is something that I came across at work which I think when you say it like that it sounds pretty wild but when you like drill down into the nitty-gritty it's more believable I think people
think of rats as is quite clever I feel like that's a commonly held thing of all the animals but then to have imagination suggests cognitive ability beyond that I think more like awareness of self and awareness of like things being there and not being there like being able to imagine a place is quite a complex skill to imagine an animal having you think see I I would kind of think that to be able to survive in the wild rats and a lot of other animals would just kind of
be able to do that sort of thing like how would they remember where they put food or where where the danger lies or whatever else if they can't sort of think these things through and imagine a scenario in the future yeah that's interesting yeah but then it's not really my field of expertise all I know is what I've seen my rats do do you think your rats remembered stuff that you taught them definitely so we had them in a pen in the evenings on the living room floor which was cell taped
to the edge of the fireplace and when the tape came away rocket was like oh I can get out of here I'll push this side and around the living room and when we put new tape on to tape it back up she still remembered that she could have gotten out and she would stand there pushing quite violently against it until we told her off and had to train her out of doing it I wonder if she could imagine the possibilities of being like I could escape and then go wherever I
could imagine could think of like she knew that there was more out there beyond the tape wall she did but fly enough if she really wanted to CU she could jump up on top of that barrier that formed the edge of the player pen right she could just jump down the other de side but she never did so maybe she couldn't imagine doing that so is that imagination or is that just memory that's what I was going to say like training is basically memory like you do the same thing over again
you learn that you get a reward for completing a task and then you remember what to do to get that reward so we this came about because we looked at this study and they put brain electrodes on rats obviously and used VR to show that rats could navigate using the like brain machine interface but not navigate as in walk from A to B while wearing the thing but navigate through the VR space see putting a rat in VR in virtual reality so they had it looked from the
experimental set like they had like a little goggles set up in front of them with a little screen yeah I think that's what they did that's what I got from that image I could have sworn that studies were shown that rats have really terrible eyesight yeah that's so true and they tend to navigate using their whiskers to detect air currence and sense of smell and whatever else and sound presumably so just looking at VR I'm very surprised that the rats could do this so they they
obviously do have some ability to see things and I don't know if they just happened to find rats that incidentally had good eyesight yeah I don't know how much eyesight even played a part of it because in one of the studies they had to move an object to a goal in like within the VR reality like by using their brain waves so like how you would imagine sitting in an office and instead of getting up to go to the coffee machine and filling it with coffee that would have been the goal for the mouse
for the rat but they weren't actually moving it they would just imagining doing it in their mind that sounds less like training and much more like cognitive behavior for me as a non-expert in behavior and biology but that sounds like a imagination cuz I can imagine like walking through the pace is like muscle memory yeah but to actually see a thing and yeah use the brain waves to visualize it yes they were also on treadmills so they were moving as if you would if you were playing a VR game
you'd still be moving and they also so they like found out that they could do this because they were looking at the firing patterns of the hippocampo cells in the brains of the Rat and they did semi- Trin them like they trained the BMI machine to like learn what the hippocampal cells firing look like I think yeah the BMI machine every time you say that I think body mass index I know yes but it means brain machine interface right this one is brain machine interface yeah basically the
electrodes that they somehow inserted into the rat brain which they don't seem to talk about in the research article at all I'm sure I saw in the press release they basically did surgery on the brains to put these sensors in there I would have thought so not just on the outside cuz when I had a study it was just glue to my scalp did they shave your scalp first no they just rubbed it really hard and it hurt yes I've had one of those done and they measure your brain waves
doing that I think this is more involved though I think this is quite invasive so not only did they create a study about how a a rat's brain works and create an interface against it they made VR goggles they made a little mini game Space little harness to put the right in yeah a little harness yes it's involved they also named it the Jed experiment because they were like using the force to move something with their mind that's a lot of effort that they went to why
why is a good question the brain machine interface it mentioned the research paper they're talking about it is it possible to control robotic arms using only your mind o and how does the brain actually work to do that like if they could do it in rats could then we translate this to people in some way because they have been studying on people where you're supposed to like you can control a car like park a car in a garage using any your thoughts you might have done those they're quite common at
like science fairs so I don't know if this is like a similar thing to like harness the power of your brain waves but it is I think it's quite interesting in terms of both potential applications for people but also knowing rats could do this like rats I said they were intelligent but in the grand scheme of things they're not up there so then presumably other more intelligent species could also do this but you wouldn't get ethics clearance to do this on like a gorilla or a chip so
why rats why why do we have lab brats as opposed to any other animal well unfortunately probably money and relative ease of breeding them and no one well people are bothered but people are much less bothered about rats than they are about things like monkeys and dogs and cats sadly yeah cuz rats have got a bit of a bad reputation for spreading diseases and just apparently being iic and they're really not they're really adorable creatures and very intelligent and very cool yeah but I
think one thing I'd read was that um because you're into breed rats it keeps their genetic Heritage fairly similar so if you wanted to have a load of rats that were the same and there are different models of rat they call it in the uh the scientific catalog if you ever want to look for some scientific equipment there are models of rat so you can have a model of rat that have a particular set of traits so it's more likely you do a particular thing I suppose if we were trying to say
replicate this in humans there's like lots of factors to consider like lifestyle and genetic whereas I suppose you kind of almost have a a fixed variable in a lab rat because you know exactly what it genetic makeup is you know where it's from and you literally keep it under laboratary conditions right yeah I mean often I think a lot of these rats would have been in this experiment potentially for most of their lives so they come from wherever you Source Rats from and they they are for
this experiment I don't know if they killed them after or euthanized them or whatever but probably and then at least if you were to replicate this experiment as a different lab a different research group you could do it in the same way and know that the rats weren't what was causing the the issues but then of course there's always individual variation and all the rest of it but it is quite unusual study really I mean brain electrodes for tiny rat brains aside in in a harness I imagine they
wouldn't like initially it does sound like quite a fun novel experiment to do seeing a rap move something in virtual reality I imagine is quite impressive it sounds like one of those sort of uni moments yeah I think so I think it's quite impressive as well because to even think we can do this can rats do this as a question is quite interesting in the first place and then okay how do we go about finding out whether rats could do this well we need to make a virtual
reality space we need to have this treadmill we need to have a brain machine in interface so even just doing the experiment in the first place we've surely already learned things that we didn't know before true but there have been other studies haven't there like um did you say preparing for this episode that there was in a study where mice were taught to play virtual reality Games yes so this is quite a similar study about sort of memories and Neuroscience I suppose but yeah they
basically got mice playing VR games and then looked at the brain activity that was happened and the reason that they did this one is because they wanted to see whether regions of the brain were involved in memory retention and they didn't necessarily know if that region that they were looking at was so this is what they decided to come up with that experiment to see if they could find out what was going on okay so I suppose that's useful for if someone's had a brain injury and
it could affect their memory in some form shortterm long-term whatever I guess it's a way of figuring out how it's being affected and how you could help rehabilitate someone yeah so this was much more of like they were on a little rolly ball and they were running through like a virtual Maze and then they ran through the maze took all the right turnings and they got the sugar water as a reward and if they like went the wrong way they got a puff of air to the face so basically they learned which
way to go to get the sugar so yeah it was definitely something that they were looking at long term to see if it was be applicable to humans I think yeah so good for Neuroscience generally and also good for understanding animal behavior as well I suppose yeah they said the anterior thalmus may be playing a bigger role than previously realized in determining what's gets forgotten and what can be recalled for weeks to come I'll pretend to know what the anterior thalmus is and where it's
located I don't know either I know it's in the brain but I couldn't tell you any more than that why did we have to make it VR instead of the traditional maze that's true I think because presumably we needed to look at the brain activity rather than just could they remember which way to go because we wouldn't have known then how to link that to the brain region so maybe by making it VR they could do a similar thing I don't know if it says on this one whether they had
brain implants to look at it cuz in the rat one cuz they were on that little roller B thing and they had in the diagram like they wearing some little helmet with all his cables coming up to the top and that was like the fixed point so I presume it is just an easier experimental setup yeah maybe that's true actually how do you scan um someone who's moving yeah we don't we don't typically do that do we no you put your R your mouse on a treadmill instead yeah give them a VR
headset and set them on their way I will say I did like running on a custom built wheel that was made specifically for them they really enjoyed that a that's like I always remember like hamsters having Wheels when I was a kid or like balls that you put them in oh yes which I think is like a good enrichment yeah apparently they got like a run as high out of using them so they they genely enjoyed running I see a lot of cat treadmills on Tik Tok and I always think
is that going a bit far I know if I bought one Sparks would just deliberately ignore it because I'd spent hundreds of pounds on wait until you've gone have a run yeah exactly she'd hear the key in the lock and immediately just pretend to be sleeping on the S there are some slightly more practical experiments on rats that don't involve virtual reality I really like the study where they taught them to drive cars I love that study I know Stewart Little is a mouse not a rat but
is it like going into a little mot radio car it was some little kit car type thing that they stuck a basically a food container on top didn't they yeah it was literally a plastic jar on Wheels but it had um controls inside the plastic jar was it like was there a plate underneath their feet and then some levers so their back feet when they were standing on the plate and then their for Paws when they were on the controls completed a circuit yeah like they were taught how to drive
it as well which took like a long time but they actually were driving it themselves to like learn a new skill I'm sure I remember people saying that the rats just like driving around afterwards like you didn't even have to give them a reward and they just drive around quite happily because they enjoyed it yes they definitely said that because they said they gave them a frary a frary I just combined two words a sugary fruit loop as a reward but then even when the
reward wasn't there they just kept driving a cute there was an idea in the research paper wasn't they that it was sort of like the enjoyment of learning a new skill and mastering something that made them want to do it yeah so they really tested this as well so they tested the rapoo for stress hormones these two hormones that they were looking for control stress and they found that after this experiment they like had less stress so they thought that the rats were happier after theyd
mastered how to drive a car which is potentially the most wholesome study that's ever happened wow so all those experiments you running wasn't wasn't a bad thing either for your rats Laura you should have got a plastic jar and a set of wheels if I have thought about it I did teach them to ride a skateboard a I've never been more sad that your rats are no longer with her I do still have the videos they are quite fun but yeah um I think I've run out of uh things
that I could feasibly teach them as well the skateboard trick was the last successful thing I did with them and it did take quite a while took a few weeks and I think it was similar to this experiment cuz I had to teach the rat to get into the jar and then approach the controls and then interact with the controls and then start mov moving the vehicle around and it was similar to getting a rat to ride a skateboard they had a little pulley and I'd already taught them how to use the pulley in a
separate setup a separate experiment told you I just experiment on them so they had to learn to get on the skateboard and then be comfortable with the skateboard moving and then operate the pulley whil on the skateboard in different configurations until they could pull themselves along that is unbelievable I'm just imagining you sat on your living room floor being like come on Ro rocket come on gr you can do it like another stage another step further yeah pretty much just a packet
of Cheerios open beside you come on guys yes they got very used to expecting treats to come from above this is what the my attempt to teach them fetch worked out as um they got really used to touching the little ball that I'd created and picking it up and then immediately looked up and kind of waved a pour in the airlight so where's the food I don't know come on yeah I was trying to teach Sparks fetch the other day and she's really good at chasing and then being by the thing but not bringing
the thing back to me oh I'd never considered teaching a cat to play fetch but why not she's probably about as good as our dog is sounds about the same behavior it's it's smudge not a fan of of of fetch he definitely likes chasing things and being chased but yeah bringing stuff back and dropping it to throw it again not so much again maybe it's just I'm not a very good trainer when it comes to fetch or the evidence so far is suggesting that he's too busy skateboarding with
his pulley yeah I'm not sure I think you've got a good track record for training uh at least rats maybe maybe smudge just needs a different approach I have no idea he's very excitable and that definitely plays a part in his ability to pay attention to things that was a part of one of the that first study study that we mentioned one of the study authors wrote he was like the stunning thing is how rats learn to think about a place and no other place for a long period of time based on
perhaps our naive notion of the attention span of a rat it's clearly a common factor of like I don't think they'll concentrate for long enough to do this but they prove us wrong every time the advice I read did say teach your rat in small burst of a few minutes at a time and that study the one about finding out the rats have imagination they did say there was one rat that was just terrible at all the experiments and just couldn't do it not all rats not all rats oh well
talking of wholesome studies there's also a really cute one about rats maybe you found this Laura that they laugh when they're tickled yes someone told me about this and they laugh in sort of an ultrasonic frequency it's about 50 HZ which is too high for human ears to hear but if you have a bat detector guess what I did of course you have a bat detector yeah didn't ever make any noise at all and any of the frequency ranges that the detector could detect and we
tested it on actual bats in the garden it could detect them but now the rats rocket and group didn't speak to each other the only time I've heard them make noises when they're angry and they'd sh each other oh or when rocket you know I said she'd push the edge of her pen to try and escape cuz she'd done it once she got her pow caught under the pen at one point was pinned between the pen and the floor and she sat there chirping away and Groot and I went running over to
rescue her oh that's so cute I mean sad for her but also you s of immediately know that the noise is not I'm playing noise it's sir please help me noise exactly it's the only time I've heard her make that noise as well but it did teach her a lesson so it's her own fault I kept telling her not to yeah they never they have to learn the hard way sometimes the rats laughing paper but there have been quite a few studies I think yeah like three or four even more there's like one research group that's
really into rat laughter yeah but apparently their research goes back to like the 90s and they were experimenting on people I think I didn't read all of their research so I might be wrong there but they just kind of had this assumption that well if human juveniles laugh and interact in a particular way when they're playing maybe rats do too maybe this 50 KZ chering we've been hearing is rat laughter I don't know if they were looking initially at toddlers or like young kids but they found that
it was very similar if you tickle a rat they make these like high pitched little chirs but then it's the same thing that making the rats laugh made them like bond together and they would find hands so they basically just tickled them with their hands but they would find those specific hands had made them laugh before and go back to those hands which is adorable that's so sweet yeah and it seemed to be specific to juvenile rats as well so an older rat was less likely
to exhibit the same behavior and seek out ticklish fingers a and also the rat pups found that they were like given a choice by one that was like quite a happy laughy rat and one that wasn't and they always spent more time with the happier grownup rat is similar to human behavior because you tend to seek out people that make you feel more positive about things right the people that cheer you up yeah of course there have been a few studies recently similar to the um the VR game
experiments where they've looked at regions of the brain that are involved in laughter and whatever else there's some also in monkeys and apes and stuff as well but I was just trying to remember about this one oh yes it was in Emotion wasn't it humans to know like what laughter means by the sound of the laugh so sometimes laughter can be be like oh that's funny I'm happy I'm laughing but also it can be like quite Sinister but people can tell by listening to the sound of the laugh what
sort of laughter it is without like obviously knowing the context I feel like you'd have to be conditioned to know that like if you'd never heard a Sinister laugh before how would you know it's Sinister well apparently so they hired actors because obviously it's very hard to record laughter in the moment so they got I think got six or seven actors and recorded them laughing and then like gave each of the actors like a scenario like a laughing typ and then yeah got
people to analyze whether they could could change it so there was joyful laughter taunting laughter Oh Shaden freuder laughter so like laughing at another person falling over and then tickling laughter like actually being physically tickled they got 72 people to come and wear headphones and listen to all these laughing tracks and yeah find out if they were able to correctly classify the four things and they could do it like laor said is that a learned behavior is that something innate kind
of like being able to identify someone's facial expression but then some neurodiverse people struggle with that a bit more and have to kind of learn it as a skill rather than knowing it like as the social like Clues rather than just knowing yeah in apparently they wrote down the shad and frer last after was interesting the most interesting because it was dominant like sounded dominant but not as dominant as the taunting so they could like really differentiate between the
two I feel like this needs more research to figure out what cues people are paying attention to and whether you do need to be taught it in advance because these are actors right they've probably been taught in acting school as as the laugh sounds like this joia laugh sounds like this yeah or how crosscultural will this be as well because what if there are certain sounds we make because we speak this language or because of the culture around you and how much of it is
actually innate human behavior yeah it did say in this laughing study that they were all English speakers but that's as far as they went with their like description of the people but yeah I think that's also true because obviously you always say like British humor and American humor are quite different so maybe like a laugh a joyful laugh in America at like that's a funny joke on TV versus a joyful laugh in the UK might not sound the same no I think I'll stick
with experimenting on rats I like the idea of tickling rats for clients I like that it makes them happy and the driving in that car that car study is just so cute can you imagine writing the grand proposal for that so in this study we would like to tickle some rats and get them to drive cars cuz it'll be fun I would like to buy 10 sets of conect Wheels please and five Motors yeah I do wonder how they got that through you know what benefit does this have to research but
they did learn stuff they did learn about stress and you know learning skills and all that sort of thing so it did have it did have scientific value beyond the fact that it's cute to watch rats drive around in little house yeah I think that's just a side benefit isn't it there has to be a really tangible reason for doing it an actual proper benefit yeah I'm also pretty sure that most of these studies came out of the United States as well and I do wonder if they the way their science funding is
set up is a little bit different and they get a little bit more free reign to just do some experiments CU they want to maybe there's also a thing about like if you haven't spent money by a certain time you lose the money so if you've got like a little pot L you might as well do something with it rather than lose it so I wonder if any of these were like oh Dave you know that little pot that we've got can can we can we use it on rat cars please before it gets you know we've
only got 12 weeks left and it'll take 11 weeks to train them we can just squeeze it in in time you'd have to be working in that sort of space in the first place so can you imagine like what what's the like our author's history of of Journal papers it was like serious neuro brain surgery and then rap driving cars yeah how did they get there that's what I want to know what's the what's the uh Rat driving car researcher pipeline what do they do for yeah cuz even just the the first one we were
talking about with the V headset I there's just so many moving Parts I can't imagine how they put this study together cuz if you were looking at one area would you think you know what I need this kind of person or do you just learn all those skills to make that experiment work yeah that's so true because you're right it is like neurosurgery or Neuroscience plus VR plus handling the rats which is a skill in itself so yeah I don't know Laura's like oh my Laura please tell us how did you do
this I just remember trying to take the rats to the vets and they were really not keen on this whole thing and then the vet trying to hold them um they weren't a rat specialist the first person I took them to it was quite a struggle because they were very small rats as well and they clearly didn't want to be there rat's eyes get quite big when they're very excited or very emotional and their eyes like popping out of their heads is the phrase that Springs to mind I mean no animal likes
going to the vet do they but still I'm sure our dog did at some points he got treats when he got to say hello to people oh that was definitely not my cat's experience I can get her into the carrier very easily by putting her favorite toy inside and I'm surprised because I would thought she Associates negativity with the carrier but she doesn't and i' I keep it in the living room so it's not like a surprise when it's out there yeah um so I could just throw her favorite toy in she goes in I
close the door a couple of minutes she's like normal and then she realizes then it kicks in she's going somewhere she doesn't want to go yeah and then all the way to the vet It's just sad meows and n on the way back it's dead quiet maybe she's traumatized by her experience yeah we're going home now it's fine I don't need to make noise but it's funny that you said sad meows because you can clearly tell that she's upset I mean you know that she's upset because she's going to the bed but is
that like the laughter like you you know that she's not doing her usual Happy laughs her happy purs or meows do you need to collect her poop and then analyze it some of the experiment of the driving cars yeah we got to look at her stress levels buff the pre and post betet visit unfortunately one of those V visits was because she wasn't pooping corre so I might not have ever got the answer now we're talking about cats which are not rats I think I finally taught Antonia
sunology but can I identify them in a picture without having known what they were before do I know what a rat is inherently probably not well some point someone's taught you yes so it's learn Behavior learn Behavior anyway we've uh yeah I think we'll draw this conversation to a close we've learned that various studies on rat Behavior could have other implications for understanding how the human brain works or other animals we could apply it to Medicine and Rehabilitation and we also know that
people can design VR for even as small as rats which can have great impact on other areas of Life and Science I'm still astounded by this I feel like I should visit one of these Labs at some point I might retrain and do another PhD in R VR please do because we would love to have that think of all the all the videos you could get of the rats in their virtual world I shall go and have a look on finder PhD yeah you're just ticking off all the different disciplines you can you can go go into
Laura sure why not cuz computational chemistry to radiation chemistry to Behavioral Science and Neuroscience makes perfect sense perfect sense absolutely we've always said that there's radiation there's chemistry in the brain you know normal now that would make an interesting Grant proposal I'll stop talking well if you'd like to hear more of this check out all episode and we'll see you in another one the views expressed in this podcast belong entirely to the person that said them
they did not represent any industry or organization if you enjoyed listening to these views it would really help us out if you could rate US leave a review and tell a friend this podcast was sponsored by no one but if you're interested in funding us to continue to have Frank discussions about science and engineering please get in [Music] touch