In a recent article for Science, Zhou and his colleagues write that "winner mice initiated significantly more pushes, and with a longer duration per push, than loser mice." Winners weren"t stronger than losers; they were simply more persistently aggressive. The researchers also found that the winner mice showed brain activity in a cluster of neurons called the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), which is associated with "effortful behavior" and "social dominance." Mice whose dmPFC was quiet during tube tests always lost.
Zhou and his colleagues wondered whether they could create "winner" mice by stimulating the dmPFC. Using a brain stimulation technique called "optogenetics" that triggers neural activity with proteins and light, they stimulated the dmPFC region of a low-ranking mouse"s brain. Then the low-ranking mouse took the tube test with a high-ranking mouse. Immediately, the loser mouse began to shove the winner mouse vigorously, winning almost every contest.
Mice do the tube test after being subjected to brain stimulation via optogenetics, a technique that uses blue light to activate neurons. This time, the lower-ranked mouse wins out over the higher-ranked one.
There are a lot of interesting implications here for further research. First of all, winning social dominance contests is clearly not just a matter of physical strength. Having an aggressive attitude is key to winning. And second, there is the question of whether this kind of technique would work on other animals and perhaps even humans. Mouse brains are similar to human brains in some ways, but our brains are far more complicated. That makes it unlikely that a shy person could be transformed into RoboCop with just one squirt of photons from a brain implant.
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