Pets can judge the time, says a study
Pets can judge the time, says a study
Stock Photo - black labrador retriever dog.
(Photo by Cuveland / ullstein bild through Getty Image)If you sometimes wonder if your dog is angry with you for staying up late, you may be right. The new evidence suggests that animals have a clear sense of time, since they use previously undiscovered neurons that seem to be activated to count the minutes while they wait.
The discovery was made by a team of Northwestern University While studying the medial entorhinal cortex of mice. Located in the middle temporal lobe, it is the part of the brain associated with memory and navigation. And because it encodes spatial information in episodic memories, the study's lead author, Daniel Dombeck, theorized that it could also function as a kind of "internal clock."
"There are many similarities between the brains of mice, cats, dogs and humans," Dombeck told Fox News. "We all have a medial entorhinal cortex (the region we find that can act as an internal clock), so it is logical to think that this region of the brain has a similar function in all these different species."
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To test his theory, Dombeck and his team put a mouse on a physical treadmill in a virtual reality environment. The mouse would run (on the treadmill) down a corridor to a door. After six seconds, the "door" would open and the mouse would get a treatment (of non-virtual reality). They would repeat this a few times before making the door invisible. Dombeck was surprised to discover that the mouse would still run and stop at the invisible door, waiting six seconds for it to "open" in order to eat. As the mouse did not know if the door was open or closed and waited exactly six seconds, the team came to the conclusion that it had to have used its internal clock.
The researchers also monitored the brain's mouse activity, finding that the mouse's neurons would fire as it was executed. When he stopped at the door, those neurons would go out before a new set started firing. These newly discovered neurons were only activated when the mouse stopped, keeping a record of the time the mouse was resting.
Dombeck believes that dogs and cats have the same neurons that code for time.
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"There is evidence that humans and monkeys can estimate time intervals using some form of an 'internal clock' and now with our work we know that mice can also explicitly represent the time intervals in their brains and can perform tasks of synchronization, "he explained. "Therefore, it is logical to think that animals between mice and humans in the hierarchical chain, like our pets (dogs and cats), can also use their brains to estimate time intervals."
The team's research could have an impact on humans. The entorhinal cortex is one of the first regions of the brain affected by neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, and researchers could study how these diseases affect the new neurons that encode time.
"When we do basic research like the one we do, it is always difficult to know where or how their results will have an impact, but in reality it is the result of basic research like ours that leads to better treatments or understanding of diseases and, Sometimes, it even provides information on how things like designing better computer programs (imitating brain function), "said Dombeck." Since the medial temporal lobe (the largest brain region that includes the medial entorhinal cortex) is one of the first regions affected by Alzheimer's disease, and since the properties of this part of the brain were unknown, it is not reasonable to think that doctors could soon ask patients to estimate different amounts of time elapsed as part of the battery of tests to detect early signs of dementia. "
The study can be found in the magazine. Nature neuroscience.
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