Rat Brains Hold Clue to Learning

By Sondra Forsyth

Although it might sound like science fiction, researchers can now tell in an autopsy what a brain learned before it died.

Scientists from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory described how they ΓÇ£readΓÇ¥ slices of a ratΓÇÖs brain after it died. The experiment showed how the rat was trained to behave in response to specific sounds.

ΓÇ£Neuroscientists have previously identified brain areas involved in learning something,ΓÇ¥ says CSHL Professor Anthony Zador, who led the team of researchers on this current work. ΓÇ£But we wanted to drill down further and identify how changes at specific connections encode a particular behavioral response.ΓÇ¥

After training the rats to respond differently to different sounds, the team thought they could use postmortem brain ΓÇ£slicesΓÇ¥ to indicate how the rats had been trained.

As a result of their analysis, Zador said, his team had ΓÇ£deciphered a tiny piece of the neural code with which the animal encoded these memories. In essence, we could read the minds of these rats.ΓÇ¥

The study was published in the journal Nature.