{"id":175488,"date":"2023-11-06T07:23:15","date_gmt":"2023-11-06T13:23:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/11\/rats-have-an-imagination-new-research-finds"},"modified":"2023-11-06T07:23:15","modified_gmt":"2023-11-06T13:23:15","slug":"rats-have-an-imagination-new-research-finds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/11\/rats-have-an-imagination-new-research-finds","title":{"rendered":"Rats have an imagination, new research finds"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/rats-have-an-imagination-new-research-finds2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>As humans, we live in our thoughts: from pondering what to make for dinner to daydreaming about our last beach vacation. Now, researchers at HHMI\u2019s Janelia Research Campus have found that animals also possess an imagination.<\/p>\n<p>A team from the Lee and Harris labs developed a novel system combining <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/virtual+reality\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">virtual reality<\/a> and a <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/brain-machine+interface\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">brain-machine interface<\/a> to probe a rat\u2019s inner thoughts.<\/p>\n<p>They found that, like humans, animals can think about places and objects that aren\u2019t right in front of them, using their thoughts to imagine walking to a <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/location\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">location<\/a> or moving a remote object to a specific spot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As humans, we live in our thoughts: from pondering what to make for dinner to daydreaming about our last beach vacation. Now, researchers at HHMI\u2019s Janelia Research Campus have found that animals also possess an imagination. A team from the Lee and Harris labs developed a novel system combining virtual reality and a brain-machine interface [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":705,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47,1879],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-175488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-neuroscience","category-virtual-reality"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/705"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175488"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175488\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}