RICHMOND, United States —
The girls can’t hide their excitement as they’re brought out to the racing
arena.
“Black Tail” is up first, taking a few seconds to
sniff her surroundings before placing her paw on a lever and zooming away.
اضافة اعلان
After storming to the finish line, she devours a
well-earned Froot Loop hanging on a “treat tree.”
Black Tail is one of the
University of Richmond’s
rat drivers — a group that first dazzled the world with their ability to
operate tiny cars back in 2019.
Now, the rodents serve as ambassadors for the
school’s Behavioral Neuroscience Laboratory, headed by Professor Kelly Lambert.
Rats climb around their car as part of a study at the University of Richmond in Richmond, Virginia, on August 2, 2022.
“It gets people’s attention about how clever and
teachable these animals are,” explained Lambert, who has to balance her
affection for the furry speedsters with the need for scientific detachment —
naming them only by the Sharpie colors that mark their tails.
The idea of racing rodents started out as a playful
challenge from a colleague.
But far from
being a novelty act, the animals are part of a boundary-pushing project
exploring the ways in which environmental enrichment sculpts the brain — and
could in turn hold potential for solving human mental health challenges.
For Lambert, one of the great failings of modern
medicine has been its inability to cure mental illness through drugs, even as
pharmaceutical companies have reaped in huge profits.
These pharmaceutical approaches have faced
increasing scrutiny since a landmark study published in July questioned the
theory that chemical imbalances, especially a lack of serotonin, cause
depression.
Froots
of their labor
Instead, Lambert sees
behavior therapy as the key to treating the mind, which is where studying
fellow mammals comes in.
“Our brains are changing, from the womb to the
tomb,” she said. “If we have some type of engaging life, this is probably
important and related to depression.”
A previous experiment of hers had split rats into
groups of “workers,” who were assigned an effort-based reward task of digging
through dirt mounds for a Froot Loop — or a control group of “trust fund” rats
that were simply handed over treats.
When challenged with stressful tasks, the worker
rats persisted longer than those conditioned to remain in a state of what
psychologists call “learned helplessness.”
And when tasked with swimming, the worker rats
showed greater emotional resilience, as shown by a higher ratio of the hormone
dehydroepiandrosterone to cortisol in their droppings.
Rats that learned to drive also had biomarkers of
greater resilience and lowered stress — which Lambert suggests might be linked
to the satisfaction of acquiring a new skill, like a human mastering a new
piano piece.
“They make pathways that they take over and over
again in the wild, and we wanted to see if they could continue to have this
great navigational skill in a vehicle,” explained research lab specialist
Olivia Harding.
Training wasn’t simple: the team first tried having
the rats nudge the driving control with their snouts, before finding the
animals preferred to stand on their hind legs and use their front paws.
Early car models required the rats to touch wiring
placed in the front, left or right of the car, completing a mild electric
circuit that corresponded to movement direction.
Now, though, they get around in fancier rides with
levers designed by a roboticist.
Even when their cars were placed in an unfamiliar
spot, pointed away from the treat, the rats learned to turn their vehicles and
navigate toward the reward, indicating advanced cognitive processing at work.
Today’s driving ladies, Black Tail and Multicolored
Tail, show clear signs of “anticipatory” behavior when humans enter the room,
pacing back and forth and trying to climb their walls.
However, just like people, not all rats have similar
interests: while certain individuals seemed eager to drive just for the fun of
it, others did so just for treats, while still others couldn’t be coaxed into
participating at all.
Into
the wild
Female rats in particular
were long ignored by science, because earlier generations of researchers
thought their four-day estrous cycles muddied research results.
This potentially deprived scientists of
female-specific insights, a trend
Lambert has been adamant to reverse in her
experiments — and is also now a required condition for federal grants.
Lambert recognized early in her career that studying
rats living “non-enriched” lives inside cages without obstacle courses and
activities was of limited use, akin to studying humans in solitary confinement.
In her driving study, rats raised in enriched cages
fared far better at driving tasks.
Her most recent paper focused on differences between
lab rats and those caught in the wild — finding the latter had larger brains,
more brain cells, larger spleens to fight disease, and much higher stress
levels than their captive cousins.
“It kind of blows my mind” that there had been so
little interest in understanding these differences, given their possible impact
on human medicine, she said.
It also raises an intriguing philosophical question:
are we more like the caged lab rats, the enriched-setting lab rats, or the wild
rats?
“I’m feeling a little bit closer to the provisioned
lab rat rather than the wild rat,” muses Lambert.
But the wild rats, who have to scavenge for food and
avoid predators every day of their lives — much like our own ancestors — might
have something to teach us about mental resilience.
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