What Mice, Birds, & Fish Can Teach A Self-Driving Car

...or the next Siri, or a computer that will read your mind, or any computer, really. Silicon Valley can’t hire enough neuroscientists.

- Sarah McBride and Ashlee Vance

Jaguar is a mouse. He lives at Harvard’s Rowland Institute, where, from time to time, he plays video games on a rig that looks like it belongs in A Clockwork Orange. Metal bars position him inside a small platform in front of a metal lever; his mission is to find a virtual box’s edges by feel. To do this, he reaches with his right paw to grab the joystick, which can rotate 360 degrees, and maneuvers it until he feels feedback from the machine. When he reaches the right target area—say, an edge of the box—a tube rewards him with a dribble of sugar water.

To track Jaguar’s brain activity, researchers have genetically altered him so his neurons emit fluorescent light when they fire. This light is visible through a glass plate fused to part of his skull with dental cement. A microscope affixed above the plate records images of his brain lighting up as he plays. “Within one session, you can teach them new rules and literally watch thousands of neurons learn this process and see how they change,” says Mackenzie Mathis, the neuroscientist leading the experiments.

In decades past, Mathis’s insights would have served only to advance what we know about mice and brain function. Today, however, she’s one of a growing number of specialized animal researchers assisting in the development of artificial intelligence software and brain-computer interfaces. She wants to discover how mice learn, in part because it could inform how we teach computers to learn. Watching mice react to unexpected situations in video games, for instance, could someday let her pass on similar skills to robots.