Scientists Have Found Out What Is The Secret Of The High Intelligence Of Mice - Alternative View

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Scientists Have Found Out What Is The Secret Of The High Intelligence Of Mice - Alternative View
Scientists Have Found Out What Is The Secret Of The High Intelligence Of Mice - Alternative View
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Recent studies have shown that mice communicate with each other using rather complex ultrasonic messages, vaguely reminiscent of singing. This suggested that rodents have the beginnings of consciousness. This means that they can be used to study mental and behavioral disorders of a person.

Alcoholics and drug addicts

Contrary to popular stereotypes, laboratory mice most often used in scientific research are not white, but gray-black. This is an inbred line (that is, genetically homogeneous, characterized by closely related crosses) C57BL / 6 (Black 6), bred back in 1921 by the American Jackson Laboratory. Over the past hundred years, members of this vast family have helped test thousands of drugs and new treatments and diagnostics, tested the CRISPR / Cas9 genomic editor, and even visited space shuttles and the ISS.

Mice of the Black 6 line are unpretentious and easily reproduce. It's so pleasant to work with them that researchers turn a blind eye even to their addiction to alcohol and hard drugs - these bad habits are directly mentioned on the Jackson Laboratory website. In addition, these rodents are sensitive to pain and noise, are prone to obesity, diabetes and atherosclerosis, and in old age (in their case it is 10 months) they can lose hearing. At first glance, a rather dubious experimental animal.

Contrary to popular belief, most laboratory mice are gray-black and belong to the inbred C57BL / 6, or Black 6 (pictured right). Illustration by RIA Novosti
Contrary to popular belief, most laboratory mice are gray-black and belong to the inbred C57BL / 6, or Black 6 (pictured right). Illustration by RIA Novosti

Contrary to popular belief, most laboratory mice are gray-black and belong to the inbred C57BL / 6, or Black 6 (pictured right). Illustration by RIA Novosti.

Not as stupid as commonly believed

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“Animals are needed to model diseases. Of course, primates are closest to humans, but research on them is very expensive and there is great (and growing!) Public pressure against experiments on monkeys. Therefore, today many different, including neurological, diseases are simulated on mice - even autism spectrum disorders and severe schizophrenia. But for such models, you need to squeeze at least some cognitive ability out of the mice. After all, if, for example, you have to identify the connection between a certain gene and low intelligence, then it is logical to turn off this gene and see: is the animal stupid or wiser? And it turned out that what speaks best about the mental capabilities of rodents is not puzzles, like “find a way out of the maze” or “remember the location of the feeder,” but vocalizations”,- told RIA Novosti an employee of the Institute of Biology and Medicine of Nizhny Novgorod State University named after Lobachevsky Alexander Ivanenko.

Over the past two years, Ivanenko and colleagues from the Netherlands and Germany have been trying to create the simplest algorithm for decoding such mouse vocalizations - complex sequences of sounds lying in the range between 50 and 100 kilohertz and not perceived by the human ear. As a result, scientists have proved that females and males sing different "songs". They trained artificial neural networks to recognize the gender of the "singer" and his counterpart.

“Nobody has really figured out vocalizations yet, but everyone suspects that there are some thought processes behind it - spectrograms clearly carry some kind of semantics. If you understand what is behind the structure of vocalizations, then you can start turning off different genes and see what has changed in this structure. That is, it is a potential source of new models for any neurology (including speech disorders),”explains Alexander Ivanenko.

Serenades at the bars of the cage

American neuroscientists came to similar conclusions when they analyzed the "syntax" of vocalizations of rodents and proved that certain genetic mutations can make these animals "tongue-tied."

Male mice with a defective analogue of the Foxp2 gene (in humans, it causes a specific speech disorder) were placed in different social contexts: first in a cage with a waking or sleeping female, then with a sleeping male, and finally in a cage with a female's urine. Each time, the researchers recorded the ultrasound vocalizations of the rodents. It turned out that the melody sung by the males is highly dependent on the situation. For example, when meeting with the fair sex, the mice actually began to sing serenades, and the vocalization itself consisted of a complex sequence of high and low sounds and looked like birds chirping.

Only males with normal gene variants were good at singing. Individuals with mutations in Foxp2 were not capable of such vocalizations, and their inaccuracies were comparable to the speech impairments that occur in humans.

Choral singing like a mouse

Mice are able to simulate their vocalizations and teach them to each other. Biologists from Duke University in North Carolina (USA) observed two dozen rodents with voices of different heights for several months. It turned out that if two males are placed together, then they will adjust the tone of their voices to each other until they sing in unison. Moreover, the smaller male will adjust the pitch of his voice.

This ability is called vocal learning and is quite rare in nature - only in some species of birds (parrots and starlings), whales, dolphins, seals, elephants and bats. All of these animals, including rodents, have specialized brain structures and behavioral traits that allow them to memorize the songs of their relatives. Moreover, in mice, the areas of the brain responsible for vocalization are located in the frontal lobes, just like in humans.

According to Alexander Ivanenko, in the future, the study of these particular structures will make it possible to accurately determine the level of cognitive abilities of mice and answer many questions regarding the functioning of the human brain.

“The architecture of the auditory cortex (auditory cortex of the brain. - Ed.) In mice is determined by the structure of perceived stimuli - being determines consciousness. Having understood one thing, one can get an understanding of the other,”the expert believes.

Alfiya Enikeeva