7 ms·

Rats have an imagination, new research suggests

113 points by jdmark 3y ago

latexr 3y ago
This American Life has an interesting episode on rats. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/801/must-be-rats-on-the-brain https://www.thisamericanlife.org/801/must-be-rats-on-the-bra... Act One, “Fifty First Rats” (22 minutes), is particularly interesting in that it showcases the inventiveness and awareness of rats.
fnordpiglet 3y ago
* in mice
silent_cal 3y ago
St Thomas Aquinas noticed that animals have these powers: "Now we must observe that for the life of a perfect animal, the animal should apprehend a thing not only at the actual time of sensation, but also when it is absent. Otherwise, since animal motion and action follow apprehension, an animal would not be moved to seek something absent: the contrary of which we may observe specially in perfect animals, which are moved by progression, for they are moved towards something apprehended and absent. Therefore an animal through the sensitive soul must not only receive the species of sensible things, when it is actually affected by them, but it must also retain and preserve them."
doublerabbit 3y ago
I can picture it now. An imagination of humans locked in cages while they experiment.
serf 3y ago
it's important to do the research, but this is one of those headlines that any rat owner would say "Yeah, obviously." to without a second thought. They strategize, they're mischievous, they test you, and ultimately they're quite cunning. These kind of behaviors are predicated on having an imagination to a certain degree.
- INTPenis 3y ago
  You don't even have to be a rat owner. I'd say any creature that dreams has an imagination, and dreaming is clearly visible when they're twitching in their sleep. Also just watch Mark Rober's squirrel obstacle course to see how rodents can imagine.
  - jbstack 3y ago
    Twitching isn't proof of dreaming.
    - INTPenis 3y ago
      Disclaimer; I'm not a scientist of any biological field. But OP was talking about the common perception of the article. So I chimed in as a pet owner.
  - Earw0rm 3y ago
    Something like dreaming is present very far back in evolutionary history. The last common ancestor of ray-finned fish and terrestrial mammals (450 million years ago?) presumably had it, as both branches of the tree of life show REM-like sleep and brain activity.
- ImaCake 3y ago
  These headlines only work if you are stuck in a behaviouralist view of biology where all animals behave essentially like dumb robots. It was a common view in academia until the 1950s and even later in psychiatry. These days things are much better. No serious animal cognition researcher today should be surprised by rats or mice having imaginations.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    Everyone who owns a dog knows they have intelligence and self-awareness.
    - 3y ago
dboreham 3y ago
I think our own brains have fooled us into thinking that cognitive processes are more clever/complex than they really are. The recent successes from LLMs/Generative AI give a hint that things don't need to be so complex and mysteriously difficult to be quite like human intelligence. "Imagination" seems like just an indirection mechanism: simple animal can do "go towards the food you can sense". A more complex animal can "remember where the food was sensed, then go towards that place later". An even more complex animal can: "From other sensed information (e.g. habitat type), construct the same food-memory object that the more primitive animal used, then go towards that". By the time you get to that third level of sophistication we're calling the mechanism imagination.
- 3c6bYDXLMj 3y ago
  [dead]
- alganet 3y ago
  I think you severely underestimate how sophisticated life is. Boston dynamics is trying to make a robot "go towards some stuff you can sense" for more than a decade, and what these robots can do after all this time doesn't even compare to what a rat can do. It is still several orders of magnitude off. Textual AIs can do text really well. But text is not biology, it is a simple, linear system that _humans_ invented. Identifying food, planning to get it, mapping a habitat, etc... these are very different tasks.
  - chongli 3y ago
    Textual AIs can do text really well. I would argue that even that they can’t do well at all. Look at the training set for a human. Humans learn speech, reading, and writing with a training set so small it’d be a rounding error from zero compared to what they feed into LLMs. Chomsky called this the “poverty of the stimulus” in his argument against behaviourism. Yet LLMs are fundamentally the product of Skinner-style reinforcement learning. And it shows. They have succeeded to a wonderful degree at producing a facsimile of language understanding. But possession of language? Absolutely not!
fourseventy 3y ago
How else could they plot to take over the world every night?
- WalterBright 3y ago
  The Cat was always plotting my demise. I could see it in her eyes.
- smokel 3y ago
  The results of this research are not in mice, but in a life form much closer to humans.
kkylin 3y ago
Actual paper: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adh5206 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adh5206
mupuff1234 3y ago
From the perspective of a rat owner: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/801/must-be-rats-on-the-brain/act-one-15 https://www.thisamericanlife.org/801/must-be-rats-on-the-bra...

113 points by jdmark 3y ago

This American Life has an interesting episode on rats. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/801/must-be-rats-on-the-brain https://www.thisamericanlife.org/801/must-be-rats-on-the-bra... Act One, “Fifty First Rats” (22 minutes), is particularly interesting in that it showcases the inventiveness and awareness of rats.

fnordpiglet 3y ago

* in mice

silent_cal 3y ago

St Thomas Aquinas noticed that animals have these powers: "Now we must observe that for the life of a perfect animal, the animal should apprehend a thing not only at the actual time of sensation, but also when it is absent. Otherwise, since animal motion and action follow apprehension, an animal would not be moved to seek something absent: the contrary of which we may observe specially in perfect animals, which are moved by progression, for they are moved towards something apprehended and absent. Therefore an animal through the sensitive soul must not only receive the species of sensible things, when it is actually affected by them, but it must also retain and preserve them."

doublerabbit 3y ago

I can picture it now. An imagination of humans locked in cages while they experiment.

serf 3y ago

it's important to do the research, but this is one of those headlines that any rat owner would say "Yeah, obviously." to without a second thought. They strategize, they're mischievous, they test you, and ultimately they're quite cunning. These kind of behaviors are predicated on having an imagination to a certain degree.

INTPenis 3y ago
You don't even have to be a rat owner. I'd say any creature that dreams has an imagination, and dreaming is clearly visible when they're twitching in their sleep. Also just watch Mark Rober's squirrel obstacle course to see how rodents can imagine.
- jbstack 3y ago
  Twitching isn't proof of dreaming.
  - INTPenis 3y ago
    Disclaimer; I'm not a scientist of any biological field. But OP was talking about the common perception of the article. So I chimed in as a pet owner.
- Earw0rm 3y ago
  Something like dreaming is present very far back in evolutionary history. The last common ancestor of ray-finned fish and terrestrial mammals (450 million years ago?) presumably had it, as both branches of the tree of life show REM-like sleep and brain activity.
ImaCake 3y ago
These headlines only work if you are stuck in a behaviouralist view of biology where all animals behave essentially like dumb robots. It was a common view in academia until the 1950s and even later in psychiatry. These days things are much better. No serious animal cognition researcher today should be surprised by rats or mice having imaginations.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  Everyone who owns a dog knows they have intelligence and self-awareness.
  - 3y ago

dboreham 3y ago

I think our own brains have fooled us into thinking that cognitive processes are more clever/complex than they really are. The recent successes from LLMs/Generative AI give a hint that things don't need to be so complex and mysteriously difficult to be quite like human intelligence. "Imagination" seems like just an indirection mechanism: simple animal can do "go towards the food you can sense". A more complex animal can "remember where the food was sensed, then go towards that place later". An even more complex animal can: "From other sensed information (e.g. habitat type), construct the same food-memory object that the more primitive animal used, then go towards that". By the time you get to that third level of sophistication we're calling the mechanism imagination.

3c6bYDXLMj 3y ago
[dead]
alganet 3y ago
I think you severely underestimate how sophisticated life is. Boston dynamics is trying to make a robot "go towards some stuff you can sense" for more than a decade, and what these robots can do after all this time doesn't even compare to what a rat can do. It is still several orders of magnitude off. Textual AIs can do text really well. But text is not biology, it is a simple, linear system that _humans_ invented. Identifying food, planning to get it, mapping a habitat, etc... these are very different tasks.
- chongli 3y ago
  Textual AIs can do text really well. I would argue that even that they can’t do well at all. Look at the training set for a human. Humans learn speech, reading, and writing with a training set so small it’d be a rounding error from zero compared to what they feed into LLMs. Chomsky called this the “poverty of the stimulus” in his argument against behaviourism. Yet LLMs are fundamentally the product of Skinner-style reinforcement learning. And it shows. They have succeeded to a wonderful degree at producing a facsimile of language understanding. But possession of language? Absolutely not!

fourseventy 3y ago

How else could they plot to take over the world every night?

WalterBright 3y ago
The Cat was always plotting my demise. I could see it in her eyes.
smokel 3y ago
The results of this research are not in mice, but in a life form much closer to humans.

kkylin 3y ago

Actual paper: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adh5206 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adh5206

mupuff1234 3y ago

From the perspective of a rat owner: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/801/must-be-rats-on-the-brain/act-one-15 https://www.thisamericanlife.org/801/must-be-rats-on-the-bra...