The Current - Why rats just love to drive little cars

Episode Date: November 22, 2024

Rats can drive little cars — and not only that, getting behind the wheel seems to bring them joy. Researcher Kelly Lambert explains why she taught rodents how to burn rubber, and what it might teach us about ourselves. 

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current Podcast. Picture this, a tiny rat pulls on a string to open the door to a tiny garage made out of cardboard and popsicle sticks. Then the rat hops into a tiny garage made out of cardboard and popsicle sticks. Then the rat hops into a tiny electric car and starts steering. This, it turns out, is a regular scene at Sean Stevens Wales and Kendall Crawford's home in Squamish, British Columbia. The couple has two pet rats named Cusco and Cronk, and for Kendall's birthday, her dad surprised her with two homemade

electric cars for the rats to learn to drive in. Sean, as you can imagine, was skeptical at first. I did not think they were going to figure anything out. It turns out that Crisco and Cronk really took to it. The rats learned how to push down on the paw-sized pedals on day one, and after about a week, they had steering in hand or paw. Their ability to conceptualize where they are, just as humans do when they're driving, is pretty incredible. Cuzco and Kronk have gone viral on social media right now, but they're not the first rats to get behind the wheel.

Researchers at the University of Richmond in Virginia actually started teaching rats to drive in 2017. The first prototype car was made out of a plastic cereal container. Not surprisingly, news of that research also went viral. This is probably the best thing that you'll see all day. New this morning, rats. Take a look right here. Rats driving tiny cars in exchange for Froot Loops. But you can see the rats actually navigating this little arena.

It is both the coolest and cutest thing in the entire world. By the way, side note... They're driving these tiny cars! Oh I see, so as it's pedaling, as it's sort of pedaling, it's moving it forward. Is that the way it works? It is. The original goal of this research was to look at how training the rats to drive might affect their brains. Five years later, the project has evolved. Now they're delving into whether rats feel excitement, even joy, and what we might learn from that. Kelly Lambert is a professor of behavioral

neuroscience at the University of Richmond in Richmond, Virginia. Kelly, good morning. Good morning. The brain spins thinking about all of this. Why did you decide you wanted to teach rats how to drive? Yes, that's a great question. One of my colleagues who was a cognitive scientist when I came here to the University of Richmond, she challenged me with a question of whether or not I could teach a rat to drive a car. She had seen some exhibit with fish in an aquarium. And I'm a behavioral neuroscientist interested in neuroplasticity, how the brain changes in response to environment. And at first I thought,

why would I want to do that? But once you start thinking about this, it kind of invades your, hijacks your brain, and it's hard to not think about it. And we saw that there was potential to learn more about how a rat could acquire a very complex skill. So it became a serious-minded project, but then they seemed to enjoy it so much that has caused me to pivot our research to look at more positive emotions and use some of the rat experiences to understand more about that. So it was a challenge, but it turned out to be very interesting. And the rats are considering to drive the research in my lab. I want to talk about the positive emotions that come out of this, but just quickly tell us how you teach a rat how to drive. And they're operating these ROVs, rat-operated vehicles, right? Yes, we like to call them that. We use good

old-fashioned psychology operant behavioral conditioning and shaping. So you need a reward or an incentive and that's a Froot Loops cereal piece in our lab. That's our currency for the rats. So they're very motivated to do something to get that. So first we have to introduce them to the car so they feel comfortable getting in and then approaching the dashboard, if you will, and then activating the driving mechanism, the will, and then activating the driving mechanism, the lever, and then pressing that down. So we require them to do a little bit more day after day after day to learn to drive forward. And then we've played around with different, we're in our third version of the ROV, and we have different levers for right and left turns.

So once we teach them to turn, to go straight, then use that conditioning, that behavioral shaping to teach them to turn right and left. And interestingly, the first time we taught them steering, once they learned to go left, they generalized and they, as if they had the concept of turning and they automatically knew how to turn the car right. So they're surprising us with, I should know, I've worked with rats over 30 years and they constantly outsmart me and surprise me. But they're continuing to do so. So how did you figure out that they got some sort of excitement or joy from this? That they weren't just looking for the reward, but something else was going on.

Yeah, and it's hard to disentangle it from the reward. But what really struck me was during the pandemic, my trainees and I, well, all the students were gone and we had one group of driving rats. And this has become science outreach as well as what I'm talking to you. So I went into, you know, I think everybody kind of had a low mood during the pandemic, but I went into the lab to check on the rats to feed them that day. And I just, they just came up to the cage and they were climbing up and down and reaching out. And they just seemed so excited to see me. And I was excited to see them. And I know we have to be careful about using these terms with rats, but they were

showing all this, you know, intensity of behavior. And I just decided then that I wanted to learn more about what that response, it it looks and we're using the word joy and some animal work now this intensity of a response and I so we pivoted and that inspired me to come up with another protocol where we give our rats we call it unpredictable positive experience responses uppers with just one. And so we're extending anticipation and really manipulating, making them, giving them a stimulus that's associated with a reward and requiring them to wait for it. So it's a lot of wait for it. And they show this excitement. several weeks of that upper's training, now we're looking at how that influences cognitive strategies like optimism strategies, which you can assess in a rad and an interesting way,

and their boldness and cognitive tasks. And anticipation really revs up a lot of the brain and it is rewarding in itself. There's research to suggest that as we're approaching a reward or anticipating it, some of those same neurochemicals, such as dopamine, that are involved in reward and other important behaviors, are activated. So we're getting our own natural kind of hit of some of these feel-good neurotransmitters and neurochemicals as we're thinking about something positive. So we don't want to deprive our brain of that in this society today where we have these immediate rewards. This delayed gratification may be very healthy for our brain, especially children whose brains are being sculpted in more dramatic ways than adults. But all of our brains are changing throughout our lives. Rats can experience optimism?

Well, we think so. Can we talk about it? No, no, I just, we only, like, I could talk to you for hours. We only have about a minute and a half left, but I just, I think one of those, that's one of those things I think would surprise people. They may not expect that rats could experience optimism. So tell me briefly about that. It's a cognitive bias or strategy. So you give them an ambiguous cue and see if they respond in a positive, what's associated with positive or negative.

And at least for the males, we're shifting. The females seem to be a little bit more grounded in what we've done so far. And that might be relevant for humans as well. But yeah, it's a cognitive strategy. And so we're excited to at least they're shifting on a rat model of optimism. This is still preliminary. We're writing some of this up. We presented it at conferences, but it's just surprising where these rodent studies can take us. How should we think differently about these rodents then?

That's an interesting question. They're mammals. their brains have all the same areas that we have, they can experience complex emotions. So maybe with a little bit more respect, we certainly respect them in research. But in New York City, we have the rat czar trying to figure out how to kill as many as possible. I know it's a problem. We need to figure out how to live with all of the animals, this is a challenge. But I do respect rodents. I read a whole book, The Lab Rat Chronicles, about all the lessons I've learned from these animals. There's something to take from that, I think. Kelly, thank you very much for this. There's a lot that I'm thinking about. I see rats on my way into work almost every morning. Oh, really?

Yes. Yeah. And that's how I think about them but now i should think perhaps differently about those we're starting to look at the wild ones and they are some tough cookies they are very different from these docile lab rats but they're amazing and their ability to cope with the reality of the real world out there so i think we can learn about coping mechanisms from those wild rats the last thing i want to see is one of them behind the wheel of anything um kelly thank you very much you You're quite welcome. Have a good day. Kelly Lambert is a professor

of behavioral neuroscience at the University of Richmond in Richmond, Virginia.