By stimulating an area of the brain in rodents, scientists turned mice into hungry, aggressive predators.
She looks cute, like that, with her little disheveled mustache, her soft coat and her endearing way of grooming, putting her paws behind her delicate ears. The mouse is the good one in Tom and Jerry; it is also the one that fills children’s piggy banks when they lose a tooth. But stimulate an area of his brain and in seconds this harmless rodent will turn into a ferocious beast, thirsty for violence and blood.
“Walking Dead”
American researchers have made a strange discovery during an experiment carried out on the brains of mice. As they stimulated an area of the brain involved in pleasure and fear with the help of a laser (the tonsillar area, in this case), they were able to observe the immediate transformation of their little guinea pigs, which had become insatiable predators. .
Suddenly, the stimulated mice embarked on a rabid quest for prey, preying on anything that could closely or remotely resemble food, furiously planting their pair of teeth in objects as inedible as a stick. of wood or a bottle cap.
“We turned on the laser and the mice started to jump on an object, holding it between their paws and biting it with force as if they were trying to capture and kill a prey”, explain the researchers, who relate this discovery in the journal Cell. They had no intention of making killer mice. However, they inspired them with a metaphor: the zombies of “Walking Dead” – except that they did not attack their fellows.
Big hunger
The authors therefore activated and amplified the predatory instinct in mice by stimulating this area. As soon as the targeted neural network was no longer stimulated by the laser, then the aggressiveness subsided and the mice returned to normal activity. The researchers note that hunger plays a very important role in this predatory behavior, since among all the rodents stimulated, hungry mice chased prey with much more aggressiveness than satiated mice.
“This brain system is not only linked to aggression in general, but seems to be associated in these animals with the search for food,” the researchers further explain. Results that it would be better not to replicate on humans, if we are to believe the many science fiction novels and series that start in a laboratory and end with the end of the world…!
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