While some species of rodents may be scary to some people and have a bad reputation, rats are very intelligent and make great pets if cared for properly. Rats are naturally curious, have good memories and are easy to learn. By understanding how smart a rat is, you can more fully appreciate these tiny rodents, keep them safe, and give them the mental stimulation they need.
Rats Intelligence
Scientists who studied these animals came to the conclusion that a smart rat is capable of not only associative, but also cause-and-effect thinking. These gray rodents appeared on earth even before humans. And no matter how they tried to fight them, they failed. And all because they are capable of self-organization and social interaction.
Rats live in packs, in which each individual has its own purpose. For example, the task of intelligence officers is to study everything new. They are the first to enter unknown territory, determine the living conditions on it, and get acquainted with new food. And if after this the animal dies, then none of the flock will touch the dangerous object.
These smart animals can think logically and even predict events. Everyone has heard of rats leaving a ship, which subsequently gets into trouble. People say that during the war, gray rodents escaped from a ship that was attacked by an enemy a few days later.
The mental abilities of rats allow them to remember and respond to their name, they are trainable and can follow various commands. For example, spinning on their hind legs, fetching objects, jumping over obstacles like dogs.
Reproduction
Ornamental rodents are bred for sale and for breeding new breeds. To do this correctly, you need to have special knowledge. Caring for and maintaining a pet intended for breeding is slightly different from regular care.
Determination of gender
In rats, the genital organs are fully formed by 1.5 months. You can distinguish a male from a female by several characteristics. Males have large testicles, which can be seen by raising their tail. The female has two rows of nipples; males do not have them. You can also determine sex by the distance between the anus and the urethra (females have less, males have more). Males are much larger than females. In babies, it is more difficult to determine the sex; this is possible only after reaching 5-6 days of age. Females are distinguished by the presence of nipples.
Mating
Sexual maturity occurs at five weeks of age, but mating is possible from eight months of age. For successful reproduction, individuals are selected without birth defects, both must be healthy. Mating is excluded between related animals. The female and male are placed in the same cage for 2-3 days. Fertilization is possible during estrus, which lasts from 12 to 20 hours, every 5-7 days.
Pregnancy
Pregnancy of domestic rats lasts 22-23 days. If complications occur, premature birth cannot be ruled out.
Signs of pregnancy:
- pear-shaped body;
- rounding and enlargement of the abdomen;
- nipple enlargement;
- increased appetite;
- decreased activity.
As birth approaches, the female becomes restless and begins to build a nest. The average number of cubs is up to 10.
Newborn care
In the first days, the mother does not leave the babies, so it is undesirable to touch them. The temperature in the nest must be maintained at least 38-39 degrees. By the second week of life, babies open their eyes, and by the third they begin to become active and explore the surrounding space.
Taming Ability
Smart rats are very easy to tame. It's hard to believe, but they don't like being alone. The wild animal is reluctant to make contact, but over time it quickly gets used to the person and literally follows on his heels.
Taming must be handled responsibly. There is no need to rush, as psychological pressure on an intelligent animal can provoke stress and other health problems.
First, the animal needs to create a secret corner in the cage so that it can hide if it wants. And it is better to place the house in a place where he can often see people. This way the taming process will go faster.
At first, you should not touch the rodent with your hands. He must get used to the owner and show a desire to make contact. You can talk to him and treat him with treats. Once your smart pet gets used to it, you can play with it or train it.
Feeding
The diet of pet rats should be balanced, taking into account their weight and food preferences.
Main Products
The main products are:
- cereals;
- legumes;
- nuts and dried fruits;
- raw and boiled meat;
- fish;
- boiled eggs;
- cheese and cottage cheese.
Favorite treats
Each animal has its own taste preferences, but there are several products that are among their favorite treats. This can be a biscuit, a sweet bun, cookies, as well as grapes, apples and other fruits.
Forbidden food
You should never give your rat onions, garlic, sweets, or chocolate. In addition, you should not treat your pet to fruit and berry seeds, as well as exotic fruits. Among the vegetables, the following are undesirable: white cabbage, turnips, radishes, radishes, eggplant, fresh herbs.
Watering
Water contains useful minerals, so timely watering is very important for the health of rats. Prolonged lack of drinking can lead to death. Rats drink little, but there must be clean water available at all times. For this it is better to use automatic drinkers.
Interesting facts about the mental abilities of rodents
Scientists have concluded that rats have a collective mindset. They were able to discover other amazing mental abilities:
- They easily remember any route by which they get to the object they need, and can even determine the most optimal one.
- The animal knows how to identify danger and use for its own purposes the experience that has been accumulated by representatives of its group. If a rat tastes poison and dies, then not a single member of the pack will touch it. The same goes for traps and other items that pose a danger.
- If you tickle an animal, it will react in exactly the same way as a person - it will start laughing. And when, for example, a female’s children are taken away, she begins to make sounds similar to human crying.
- Rodents are characterized by self-sacrifice. Scientists conducted an experiment. They placed two rodents in a cage and placed a glass partition between them. There was food on one half, but as soon as the rat touched it, its relative was shocked. In this situation, the intelligent animal completely refused to eat in order to protect the other.
- Rats are able to communicate with each other using sounds that have a specific meaning. A person cannot catch them, since the frequency of their range is different from ours.
Maze Runner: Real-Time Analysis of Neural Activity in the Rat Brain
Which superpower would you choose: flight, invisibility or telepathy?
The living, in a sense, embodiment of the latter has always been the X-Men comic book character Professor Charles Xavier, who appeared back in 1963 from the pen of Stan Lee. But in comics you can find not such superpowers. What about reality? Is it possible to read the thoughts of another being? As it turns out, it is now possible, but not in the way you imagine. Today we will get acquainted with a study, the main achievement of which is reading the electronic activity of neurons in the brain of an experimental rat running through a maze in real time. How did scientists manage to get into the head of a rat, what did they achieve, and what are the prospects for their technology? The researchers' report will give us answers to these and other questions. Go. Basis of the study
Scientists note that at the moment one of the main tasks in the field of studying the brain as a complex structure is the improvement of methods and appropriate tools for collecting and analyzing the data obtained. More precisely, it is important to decipher the information hidden in the collected data of spatiotemporal activity of neural systems. In other words, scientists see that something has happened (a spike in the graph), they need to get information that corresponds to this event.
The most difficult thing, according to scientists, is to conduct such observations, collect and analyze data in real time. This is done through a NCI (neural computer interface) equipped with multielectrode sensors.
The most common format for brain research using BCI is a cyclic experiment (repeating the same conditions with each attempt). In this case, it is possible to study well certain cognitive functions such as attention, memory and learning.
Spatial navigation is the best known and most effective method for studying the above-mentioned cognitive functions. What does such verification look like, you ask? It's very simple - a labyrinth. During such experiments, so-called neural encoding of space (or “space code”) was found in many regions of the rat brain: the hippocampus, entorhinal cortex, primary visual cortex (V1), retrosplenial cortex, and parietal cortex. These “codes” are certain signals that store information about where the rat is in the maze, where it is moving and where it is coming from. It is this information that needs to be read in real time, and not just after experiments, when the rat is in a state of rest or sleep (slow-wave sleep).
The proposed methodology consists of two main stages (diagram A
in the image above): encoding and decoding.
The encoding step creates an overall probability density of the spike feature vector*
(neural signal) and spatial location. The decoration stage is responsible for reconstructing the data in the form of a spatial position, which should closely match that obtained in the previous stage.
Spike* (Peak)
is the action potential of neurons during extracellular recording of their electrical activity.
From a hardware perspective, scientists point out that the problem of real-time data analysis can be solved by using multi-threaded software on a multi-core central processing unit (CPU).
The disadvantage of such a system is the number of cores, which limits the scalability of the entire brain-computer interface system. Researchers decided to implement a graphics processing unit (GPU) into a regular quad-core computer. Using a GPU greatly speeds up the decoding process and expands system scalability. The sensors themselves were also changed, from tetrodes to high-density silicon sensors. Research results
During the tests, all system options were tested: CPU-based, CPU+GPU-based, using tetrodes and silicon sensors. The database consisted of spikes from the hippocampus, neocortex, and thalamus recorded during spatial navigation in two-dimensional space. Database options are shown in the image above ( C
).
Image #1
As the scientists expected, the GPU-based system performed significantly better than the CPU-based system.
So, in the case of database No. 1, the GPU system showed a data compression threshold (spike encoding) of 0.5 at a decoding speed of 0.02 ms/spike. Under the same CPU conditions, the system showed a decoding speed of 0.44 ms/spike (1V). Also, data compression leads to an increase in decoding speed, but also to a decrease in the accuracy of this process.
Core bandwidth also plays an important role in the decoding process. If this parameter was small, then the degree of compression had little effect on the decoding accuracy.
Plot of accuracy of decoded data versus real data.
In addition to the excellent speed of data decoding, scientists also boast of a high degree of decoding accuracy.
Next, the researchers conducted an experiment in which the rat had to move through a figure-eight maze, and tetrodes read not only the CA1 region of the hippocampus, but also the primary visual cortex V1.
Decoration was carried out in a mixed format: CA1 separately, V1 separately and CA1 + V1. Analysis of V1 data showed that the spikes in this region store an impressive amount of information related to spatial movement. By combining V1 data with CA1 data, scientists were able to improve overall decoding accuracy ( 1C
).
Kernel parameters were optimized for each brain region (CA1 and V1) separately based on cross-validation data. At the same time, the decoding accuracy was high. And with zero data compression, as expected, the decoding speed was very low.
The next experiment was carried out in a labyrinth, which can hardly be called such, given its appearance - a simple ring. The rat ran in a circle, and the tetrodes read data from the anterior nucleus of the thalamus. This area of the brain is one of the most important in the process of memory formation and spatial orientation.
An important point is that most of the neurons in the anterior nucleus of the thalamus are head direction neurons. Therefore, in the process of data analysis, we took into account not only the activity of the brain lobes corresponding to the position of the body, but also the position of the head, since these two parameters may differ.
Analysis of the activity of neurons in the anterior nucleus of the thalamus confirmed its relation not only to the position of the head, but also to the spatial orientation of the subject during tests. However, in the case of the circle test, there was a decrease in the accuracy of decoding head position data, which was not related to the speed of the rat's movement. This is due to the direction of movement. More precisely, the calculations took into account both options - clockwise and counterclockwise.
This test (running in a circle) is important not because of the trajectory of movement or the complexity of the labyrinth (in fact, it doesn’t exist, it’s just a ring). An important factor here is the speed of the rat's movement. During running, the activity of neurons also accelerates, thereby controlling the movement of the rat. The GPU-based system was able to decode hippocampal neuron spikes significantly faster (with fewer training trials) than a conventional CPU-only system.
Image #2
The tetrodes used in the experiments made it possible to obtain fairly accurate data, but this is not the limit of what is desired. Therefore, it was decided to also test silicon multichannel electrodes. Picture 2A
a 64-channel silicon electrode is shown. Two such sensors were placed in the left and right hippocampus.
It was also necessary to check how scalable the system was. To do this, the data from the silicon electrodes was “cloned” until the number of hypothetical channels reached 2000. Next, the system had to decode this data during the period of movement (running) and rest (slow sleep phase). The results are shown in the 2D
.
Optimization of the graphics processor and the use of direct memory access made it possible to achieve the following indicators: decoding time during the movement period - 250 ms, decoding time during the rest period - 20 ms. In the second case, data compression was not carried out at the encoding stage, and in total about 1200 channels were used.
Schedule 2E
shows that the time required for decoding for a fixed number of channels increases greatly if the system uses only the CPU. The decoding slowdown when using a GPU is not as significant and does not occur as dramatically.
An important feature of this study is the reading and processing of neuronal activity data in real time. A GPU system is ideal for this as it can decode a large amount of data in a very short period of time, as previous tests have shown.
To test the system, decoding of hippocampal activity during the slow-wave sleep phase (741 recalls of possible events from memory) was carried out.
Image #3
Comparing the standard post-test data analysis technique with the real-time technique, the scientists found an increase in the accuracy of the reconstruction (during slow-wave sleep) of the rat's movement trajectory. That is, the system reconstructed the trajectory along which the rat moved during the test much more accurately. At the same time, the system analyzed the activity of neurons after the test, during the rest period (slow-wave sleep phase).
For a more detailed introduction to this study, I strongly recommend that you look into the scientists’ report and additional materials to it.
Epilogue
This study first confirmed that reading neuronal activity in real time is possible. When we are talking about such a complex system as the nervous system, any delays in analyzing its activity greatly reduce the accuracy of the data obtained. Therefore, this study is so important.
Using their technique, scientists were able not only to construct a rat’s movement route based solely on brain activity, but also to reconstruct this route using the memory of the test animal. This is truly incredible, damn difficult and definitely promising.
Further improvement of the system will make it possible to analyze data with greater accuracy and speed, which will make it possible to understand the principles of brain operation, the interconnection of neurons with each other, their reactions to external factors, and to compare certain events occurring in the body with the activity of certain neurons, rather than parts of the brain as a whole.
The brain remains one of the most poorly understood systems in the world.
However, through the efforts of scientists, whose imagination in creating new methods for studying it is truly limitless, we will be able to understand more. And the more we know about how the brain works, the better we can influence it. In a good sense, of course: diagnosing diseases in the early stages, treating advanced brain diseases, etc. In this case, knowledge is not only power, but also health. And, of course, Friday offtopic: Advertising from the “funny but strange” category, especially considering the product that is being advertised
Thank you for your attention, stay curious and take care of your health. Have a nice weekend guys.
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Benefits of rat skills for humans
The amazing ability of rats to foresee the future has long been used by humans. For example, during the defense of Stalingrad, people noticed that animals were running away from those houses that were supposed to be hit by a shell. So they tried to follow them.
Today, research is being conducted on the ability of rodents to detect diseases, which even high technology in medicine is not always able to do. It has already been proven that they can detect tuberculosis, diabetes and oncology even in the early stages of development. This is possible thanks to the animal's amazing sense of smell.
In some countries, these smart rodents serve as customs officers because they can detect drugs and explosives. Unlike dogs, they are able to get into almost anywhere and instinctively sniff everything around.
The mental abilities of these animals are amazing. Perhaps in the distant future, studying the intelligence of rats will allow humanity to gain other unique knowledge and experience
