Scientists have managed to reconstruct short videos based on the brain activity of mice, in a project that aims to discover how animals perceive the world around them.
These recreated videos are blurry and pixelated, but they give a general idea of how rats process the images they see. In the experiment, the animals watched short clips of people participating in various sporting activities, such as gymnastics, horse riding, and wrestling.
The study is still in its early stages, but scientists hope that as technology advances, they will be able to better understand animals' perceptions and how their brains react to the environment.
According to Joel Bauer, a researcher at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, humans can describe in words what they see or dream, while with animals this is impossible. “With humans you can ask: what did you see or what did you dream? With animals we don’t have that opportunity,” he explains.
At the heart of the study was an artificial intelligence program that predicts how electrical activity in the visual cortex of the mice's brains changes depending on what they see. The visual cortex takes information from the retina and transforms it into a comprehensible picture of the world.
To reconstruct the images the mice were seeing, the scientists used an infrared laser to record the activity of neurons in the visual cortex while the animals watched about 10 seconds of video. They then fed the program blank video data and gradually modified it until the artificial intelligence produced activity patterns similar to those observed in the mice's brains. The results of the study are published in the scientific journal eLife.
Mice have poorer eyesight than humans, so the recreated videos may not be as clear as the original footage. However, the researchers believe that in the future their quality could be significantly improved.
Currently, the reconstructed videos only show a small part of the animals' field of vision, but future studies may be able to reconstruct the entire panorama they see by analyzing signals coming from both eyes.
While Bauer is enthusiastic about this method for studying animals, he is more cautious about using it in humans. Some research groups are also trying to reconstruct images and perceptions from human brain scans, which could raise serious privacy concerns.
“If we could one day reconstruct not only what people see but also what they imagine, that could infringe on their privacy,” he warns. “Not everything that goes on in our minds should be visible to others.”
As for animals, researchers believe this technology could pave the way for understanding their experiences. In the future, it could help answer questions like what animals see in their dreams, whether they are fooled by optical illusions like humans, or even whether they experience hallucinations under certain circumstances.
In the distant future, this approach could allow for the reconstruction of a much more complete experience of the animal world, including their emotions. Such a development, according to Bauer, could create a much deeper level of empathy between humans and other species. “It would be wonderful to really understand how they experience the world,” he says. /GazetaExpress/
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