In neuroscientist Kelly Lambert's lab at the University of Richmond, rats hop into cars, rev their engines and skid across the floor of an arena. Researchers taught these tiny rodents to drive — and turns out, they really like it. But why?Host Regina G. Barber talks with Kelly about her driving rats, and what they tell us about anticipation, neuroplasticity, and decision making. Plus, why optimism might be good for rats, and for humans too.Want to hear more fun animal stories? Let us know at [email protected] — we read every email.Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What fascinating research is being done with driving rats?
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Shortwavers, Regina Barber here. And today, our story starts with a rat scientist.
You know, I know we're not a big rat and they're not little humans, but at a basic level, they have mostly all the same brain areas. Neurochemicals like dopamine and serotonin and plasticity kind of fertilizers that we look at, all of that is in a rat brain.
That's Kelly Lambert. She's a professor of behavioral neuroscience at the University of Richmond. And a while ago, this colleague of hers, a cognitive scientist who's into robotics and design, reached out with kind of a weird question.
She sent an email one night and said, Can you teach a rat to drive a car? And I consider myself a serious-minded neuroscientist, so my initial response was, why would I want to do that? But then she reconsidered. Once you start thinking about teaching a rat to drive a car, you can't not think about it. You can't stop thinking about it. Fast forward to a couple years later, guess what this is?
Here we go. If you guessed that's the sound of a rat driving a tiny car, you're right. Kelly's rats are in a lab at the University of Richmond zooming in these four-wheeled little plastic boxes around this big arena.
Almost like a playpen around the entire room and then... some kind of flooring that we put, that we roll out that's a flat surface, and it's black and white check, so it kind of has this raceway kind of idea. And we start the car on one end, and at the other end is what we call the Fruit Loop tree. And we have little straws with Fruit Loops attached via marshmallows. We do give them healthy food.
They just have these treats.
And in 2020, right at the peak of the COVID lockdown, watching these rats, Kelly had a breakthrough.
We were all feeling isolated, low emotion. The students had been sent home. So I remember going in one day feeling that... low kind of feeling. And we had three rats that were our driver rats. And they ran up to the side of the cage, literally kind of jumping up and down like my dog Brody does when I say, you want to go for a walk? And he's flipping around. And they were reaching out to me.
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Chapter 2: How do rats and humans share similarities in brain function?
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Okay, Kelly, describe this setup. So, like, what do the carts look like that the rats are driving, and how do they do it?
Right now, we're in our third version of our rat car. So, we're in Rat Car 3 that we call rodent-operated vehicles. They're a little smaller than a shoebox, and they have the tires, and they have a steering mechanism that we had to figure out. And we use kind of old-fashioned...
operant behavioral conditioning with a Froot Loop as the incentive, that's the currency of my lab, to shape them behaviorally to enter the car, to stay in the car, to press the lever and keep that lever pressed to activate and to drive the car to the Froot Loop tree, which is their destination.
Okay, that seems like a lot of work, but you're saying these rats, they like this. They like driving. Like, how do you know that? Is it from their brains? Is it from their behavior? Or is it like both?
That's a really interesting question and probably the most popular question, frequent question that people have asked me. Do they like it? I can't give them a Qualtrics survey or something like that. So I can look at their behavior. When we bring them into the lab and to their driving arena, we transport them from their transport cage into the car, they jump in automatically.
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Chapter 3: What was the initial reaction to teaching rats to drive?
So maybe the anticipation is even more rewarding than the actual event sometimes. But if we deprive ourselves of all that anticipation, we're really depriving our brains of a lot of feel-good chemicals and such. So the rats may be prolonging the feel-good time, the time that they're enjoying themselves. driving or anticipating that fruit loop.
Okay, so you mentioned that there are like physical like behavior cues that these rats are, they are experiencing this dopamine. Can you tell me a little bit?
Yeah, again, it's exploratory, but just kind of blew my mind. So we were doing another test with these, we call them upper trained or positive anticipation trained rats, where they were in an arena. And A student said, Dr. Lambert, why does the rat have its tail sticking straight up? And it was like an umbrella, you know, kind of a hook.
And sure enough, the upper trained or anticipatory trained animals had it sticking up more. And I didn't know what this meant. So I put a picture on social media. I said, has anyone seen this? Because I just hadn't. And a few people said, oh, yes, if you inject morphine into a mouse or a rodent, their tail goes up.
And I thought, have we changed these opiates in these animals through behavioral training? So dopamine for pleasure and opiates for well-being, that's a pretty good cocktail from behavioral training. And I've introduced this word behaviorceuticals that we can change our— So it was maybe the perfect behaviorceutical, but we're still exploring.
It's just great to watch the animals and they give you clues about what to look at next.
That's amazing. And I really like this like term that you've coined this like behaviorceuticals, this idea that behaviors can alter your brain chemistry, which you're seeing like similar to pharmaceuticals. How does this work with driving rats? Like add to that line of research.
Yeah, so we found that just going through the training itself, regardless if they learn to drive or not, that changed at least the hormone profiles. Oh, so it doesn't even matter if they're a good driver or not. They just like driving. It's the process. You're journey, not the destination. Yeah. Really.
there's research to suggest that stress can impair neuroplasticity or at least the healthier kind of versions of plasticity. So if this training is helping them regulate their emotions and have lower levels of stress hormones, that's going to have probably a positive impact on the brain. So if we know more about how we can intentionally and systematically change our behavior,
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