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
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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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