VIDEO: See a Thought Move Through a Living Fish's Brain | Surprising Science

13/02/12 23:56

Air & Space
magazine

goSmithsonian
Visitors Guide

Smithsonian
ChannelSmithsonian
StoreTravel
With Us

SearchSearch...

Subscribe

History & Archaeology

Human Behavior

Mind & Body

ScienceOur Planet

Ideas & Innovations
TechnologyBlogs

SpaceArts & Culture
Wildlife

Food & Travel

At the Smithsonian

Smithsonian
Institution

PhotosVideosGamesShop

Art Meets Science

News | Art | History | Food and Travel | Science

Where paleontology meetspop culture

Meet the members of thetangled human family tree

How human ingenuity ischanging the way we live

Ideas, news and discoveries
from the world of science

January 31, 2013
VIDEO: See a Thought Move Through a Living Fish’s Brain
Like908 |

Tweet

166 |

|

REDDIT |DIGG |STUMBLE |EMAIL |MORE

You may have never seen a zebrafish in person. But take a look at the zebrafish in the short video above
and you’ll get to see something previously unknown to science: a visual representation of a thought
moving through a living creature’s brain.
A group of scientists from Japan’s National Institute of Genetics announced the mind-bogglingachievement in a paper published today in Current Biology. By inserting a gene into a zebrafish larvae—
often used in research because its entire body is transparent—and using probe that detects florescence,
they were able to capture the fish’s mental reaction to a swimming paramecium in real time.
The key to the technology is a special gene known as GCaMP that reacts to the presence of calcium ions byincreasing in florescence. Since neuron activity in the brain involves rapid increases in concentrations ofcalcium ions, insertion of the gene causes the particular areas in a zebrafish’s brain that are activated toglow brightly. By using a probe sensitive to florescence, the scientists were able to monitor the locations of
the fish’s brain that were activated ay any given moment—and thus, capture the fish’s thought as it“swam” around the brain.

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2013/01/video-see-a-thought-move-through-a-living-fishs-brain/

ページ 1/5

VIDEO: See a Thought Move Through a Living Fish's Brain | Surprising Science

13/02/12 23:56

Zebrafish embryos and larvae are often used in research because they are largely translucent. Image via
Wikimedia Commons/Adam Amsterdam

The particular thought captured in the video above occurred after a paramecium (a single-celled organismthat the fish considers a food source) was released into the fish’s environment. The scientists know thatthe thought is the fish’s direct response to the moving paramecium because, as an initial part of theexperiment, they identified the particular neurons in the fish’s brain that respond to movement anddirection.
They mapped out the individual neurons responsible for this task by inducing the fish to visually follow a
dot move across a screen and tracking which neurons were activated. Later, when they did the same forthe fish as it watched the swimming paramecium, the same areas of the brain lit up, and the activity
moved across these areas in the same way predicted by the mental maps as a result of the paramecium’s
directional movement. For example, when the paramecium moved from right to left, the neuron activity
moved from left to right, because of the way the brain’s visual map is reversed when compared to the fieldof vision.
This isn’t the first time that GCaMP has been inserted into a zebrafish for imaging purposes, but it is thefirst time that the images have been captured as a real-time video, rather than a static image after the fact.
The researchers accomplished this by developing an improved version of GCaMP that is more sensitive tochanges in calcium ion concentration and gives off greater levels of florescence.
The accomplishment is obviously a marvel in itself, but the scientists involved see it leading to a range ofpractical applications. If, for example, scientists had the ability to quickly map the parts of the brain
affected by a chemical under consideration as a drug, new and effective psychiatric medications could bemore easily developed.
They also envision it opening the door to a variety of even more amazing—and perhaps a bit troubling(who, after all, really wants their mind read?)—thought-detecting applications. “In the future, we caninterpret an animal’s behavior, including learning and memory, fear, joy, or anger, based on the activity ofparticular combinations of neurons,” said Koichi Kawakami, one of the paper’s co-authors.
It’s clearly some time away, but this research shows that the concept of reading an animal’s thoughts byanalyzing its mental activity might move beyond science fiction to enter the realm of real world science
applications.

Posted By: Joseph Stromberg — Fish,Ideas & Innovations,Science | Link | Comments (2)More From Smithsonian.com

Studying the Bond
Between a Cat and Its
HumanThis African Fruit
Produces the World’s
Most Intense…

Sponsored Links

Hair and Eye Color
Can Now Be
Determined forAncient Human…

A Wandering“Homeless” Planet is
Spotted in DeepSpaceELSEWHERE ON THE WEB
The Gmail Add-On You Must Have (From TechCrunch)
Asperger’s Has Been Dropped From Diagnostic Manual (From redOrbit)
10 Best Ways Of Increasing Your Intelligence (From Gblog)
Americans Must Stop Stigmatizing Mental Illness (From National Memo)
Junior Seau Had Brain Disease Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, According to Researchers (FromNESN)[what's this?]

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2013/01/video-see-a-thought-move-through-a-living-fishs-brain/

ページ 2/5