Brain activity of free-flying bats

Date:  April 10, 2018

Source:  Johns Hopkins University

Summary:

Researchers have developed a way to study the brain of a bat as it flies, recording for the first time what happens as a roving animal focuses and refocuses its attention.

Johns Hopkins University researchers have developed a way to study the brain of a bat as it flies, recording for the first time what happens as a roving animal focuses and refocuses its attention.

This groundbreaking advance allows us to see what happens in the brains of naturally behaving animals, uninhibited by laboratory constraints. Because bats share the same basic brain structure as all mammals, including humans, the achievement, published today in the journal eLife, deepens our understanding of what happens in the brain as we move through the world.

"If you want to understand how the brain operates in the real world, you have to have the animal moving through the world in a natural way," said co-author Melville Wohlgemuth, a postdoctoral fellow. "This idea of recording the brain without wires is brand new. And no one has used it to understand how an animal senses the world and reacts to that information."

Continued  

Tracking Uncertainty's Origin in the Brain

(ISNS) -- A team of mind readers can now pinpoint exactly when a rat feels uncertain about its choices, simply by measuring its brain activity.

Doubt, they've discovered, creeps into the mind slowly. It starts with a few nerve cells near the front of the brain that get themselves into a tizzy. More and more cells join in, until a line is crossed and the mental maelstrom shakes up established patterns of brain activity -- allowing rats, and possibly humans as well, to question their old beliefs about the world and explore new options, researchers report in the October 5 issue of the journal Science.

"When your environment changes, you want to be able to reevaluate the world," said Alla Karpova, a neuroscientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm campus in Ashburn, Va. "We have seen an abrupt change in neural activity at a moment when an animal seems to abandon a previously held belief."

Continued:  http://www.livescience.com/23731-tracking-uncertaintys-origin-in-the-brain.html

Scientists Read Monkeys' Inner Thoughts: Brain Activity Decoded While Monkeys Avoid Obstacle to Touch Target

ScienceDaily (July 19, 2012) — By decoding brain activity, scientists were able to "see" that two monkeys were planning to approach the same reaching task differently -- even before they moved a muscle.

Anyone who has looked at the jagged recording of the electrical activity of a single neuron in the brain must have wondered how any useful information could be extracted from such a frazzled signal.

But over the past 30 years, researchers have discovered that clear information can be obtained by decoding the activity of large populations of neurons.

Now, scientists at Washington University in St. Louis, who were decoding brain activity while monkeys reached around an obstacle to touch a target, have come up with two remarkable results.

Their first result was one they had designed their experiment to achieve: they demonstrated that multiple parameters can be embedded in the firing rate of a single neuron and that certain types of parameters are encoded only if they are needed to solve the task at hand.

Continued:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120719141804.htm

Hornet-killing honeybees’ brain activity measured

By Victoria Gill

Science reporter, BBC Nature

Japanese honeybees' response to a hive-invading giant hornet is efficient and dramatic; they form a "bee ball" around it, serving to cook and asphyxiate it.

Now, researchers in Japan have measured the brain activity of honeybees when they form this killer ball.

One highly active area of the bees' brains, they believe, allows them to generate the constant heat which is deadly for the hornet.

The team published their findings in the open-access journal, PLoS One.

Prof Takeo Kubo from the University of Tokyo explained that "higher centres" of the bee's brain, known as the mushroom bodies, were more active in the brains of Japanese honeybees when they were a part of the "hot defensive bee ball".

To find this out, the team lured the bees to form their ball by attaching a hornet to the end of a wire and inserting the predator into the hive.

This simulated invasion caused the bees to swarm around the hornet. The researchers then plucked a few of the bees from the ball and measured, throughout each of their tiny brains, the relative amount of a chemical that is known to be a "marker" of brain activity.

Read on  http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/17381710