The Rat That Ran the Maze Twice
In 2001, neuroscientists Matthew Wilson and Kenway Louie at MIT wired electrodes into the hippocampi of rats and let them run a maze during the day. At night, while the rats slept, Wilson and Louie watched the same neurons fire, in the same sequence, at the same relative timing, as they had during the run. The correlation was strong enough that the researchers could tell, from the sleeping brain alone, exactly where in the maze the rat had been. The rats were not just resting. They were replaying.
