Watch a Mouse Play Quake 2...For Science

Posted 10/16/2009 at 6:22pm | by Jason Barry

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Yep, little Mickey is deadly accurate with the rail gun and will blow your mind as a flag runner.  Well, not quite, but he’s seriously good at turning right and avoiding walls.  Hey, everyone has to start somewhere.

It might not seem like a gigantic step for fragging-kind, but within science research communities, the work that is being done at Princeton University by neuroscientist David Tank is fairly groundbreaking.  Tank has put sensors into the brains of mice and lets them runaround a virtual world built on the Quake 2 game engine.  Further, he developed a mini-immersive environment, along with an apparatus to allow them to move freely, but keep their head held in-place to be studied.

By keeping the head fixed, and tracking the sensors in the brain of the mouse, they are able to get readings from individual hippocampal place neurons in real-time from a moving animal.  It has never been done before.

Tank modestly notes, “to be fair, more work is needed to nail this down,” referring to the findings that individual neurons are fired at varied intensities (staccato bursts).  However, Douglas Nitz for the University of California at San Diego was more candid exclaiming this is “an exciting result.”

Video after the jump.

Image Credit:  David Tank