A Navigation System for Rats Nearly as Good as Sight

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Blind rats with a sensor and compass attached to their brains were able to navigate a maze as successfully as sighted rats, researchers found.

Researchers at the University of Tokyo wanted to test whether a mammal could use allocentric sense — the awareness of one’s body relative to its environment — to replace vision. The scientists attached a geomagnetic sensor and digital compass to the visual cortices of rats with their eyes sewn shut.

When the rats moved their heads, the sensors generated electrical impulses to tell them which direction they were facing. The rats were then trained to find pellets in various mazes.

Within a few days, the blind rats . The two groups of rodents relied on similar navigation strategies. The findings, published in the journal Current Biology, could help lead to devices that help blind people independently navigate their surroundings.

“The most plausible application is to attach a geomagnetic sensor to a cane so that the blind can know the direction via tactile signals such as vibration,” Yuji Ikegaya, a pharmacologist and co-author of the study, wrote in an email.

Whether the experiment would work as well with rats that were truly blind is not yet known, Dr. Ikegaya added. Such rats might “need a longer time to learn the meaning of geomagnetic information,” he said. Still, he said he believed they would be able to do it.

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