Scientists Hack Into Fish Brain, Observe Thoughts Swimming

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Scientists Hack Into Fish Brain, Observe Thoughts Swimming
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BY Roxanne Palmer (/reporters/roxanne-palmer) | January 31 2013 2:35 PM
What do thoughts look like? Though that sort of question might sound like something posedlate one night in a college dormitory, neuroscientists are keenly interested in being able tosee signals traveling throughout the brain in real time.
Now Japanese scientists have scored a key breakthrough, using technology to watch as athought "swims" through the brain of a living zebrafish. They reported the finding in a paper
published online on Thursday (http://www.cell.com/current-biology/retrieve/pii/S096098221300002X) inthe journal Current Biology.
“Our work is the first to show brain activities in real time in an intact animal during thatanimal's natural behavior," senior author Koichi Kawakami, a researcher at Japan's National
Institute of Genetics, said in a statement Thursday. "We can make the invisible visible; that's
what is most important."
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The researchers used genetic techniques to insert a special fluorescent probe right into theneurons of the fish. When the fish saw a tasty paramecium, various pathways in the fish’s
brain lit up, allowing the researchers to correlate specific brain activities to different
behaviors.
A zebrafish’s brain is primitive, but its basic design does not differ too much from our own.
The researchers of the current study implied that they’re interested in exploring more
complex behaviors.
"In the future, we can interpret an animal's behavior, including learning and memory, fear,
joy or anger, based on the activity of particular combinations of neurons," Kawakami said.
If the technique eventually makes its way into humans, researchers could potentially use thiskind of specific brain activity reading to develop better psychiatric drugs.
"This has the potential to shorten the long processes for the development of new psychiatric
medications," Kawakami says.
This latest thought visualization experiment is just one of the many recent advances inneuroscience that have ushered in an era where hacking the brain is becoming increasingly
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Scientists Hack Into Fish Brain, Observe Thoughts Swimming

13/02/13 0:43

plausible.
In 2010, University of Utah scientists unveiled a technique that uses sensors attached directly
to the brain to translate signals into speech -- a technique that could prove especially useful
to patients rendered mute by paralysis.
A computer hooked up to the sensors was able to correctly identify what word that an
epileptic man was thinking between 76 percent and 90 percent of the time. In the initial
experiments, the resarchers only focused on a few essential words like "yes," "no," "hungry,""thirsty," "hot," "cold," "more" and "less.""Even if we can just get them 30 or 40 words, that could really give them so much better
quality of life," author Bradley Greger told the Telegraph in 2010(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/7987821/Mind-reading-machine-can-convert-thoughts-intospeech.html) .

SOURCE: Muto et al. “Real-Time Visualization of Neuronal Activity during Perception.”(http://www.cell.com/current-biology/retrieve/pii/S096098221300002X) Current Biology published online

31 January 2013.

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