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What the Empathy of the Rat can reveal about human compassion

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Bartal had hoped to see this activity in rescue rats, after all human empathy appears in these areas. But he was surprised by that too no in the rescue cage the partners showed neuronal traces. “Rats actually process when a rat is in serious condition, trapped, unhappy,” he says. “And empathy activates this system, whether it helps or not.”

If the machinery itself fires in all cases, however behaviour it’s different between team and outside couples, what gives it? The difference seemed to lie elsewhere, including in nucleic accumbens, with carrots such as dopamine, serotonin, and GABA, and stick-type neurotransmitters. “It’s active when you eat something delicious, or when you make money, or when you have sex,” Bartal says.

It is often called the brain reward center, “but it is now understood that understanding is not as easy as photography.” Accumbens ’newer approach to nuclear dopamine links him to predicting a reward and motivating his search. “The main function of the brain is to get closer to the things that are good for your survival and to avoid the things that are bad for your survival,” says Bartal.

Using a method called fiber photometry, he repeated his attempt to focus on this area, which allowed his team to control the chatter of neurons in living rats. Animal acuminates were injected with genetic material to fluoresce neurons each time a synapse was lost. They then set up fiber-optic chains while the rats looked around to observe the exploding lights. And, in fact, the rats that released roommates showed the most activity in the nucleus accumbens. Signs of this activity approached the top when they approached to open the door with their extremities. This told Bartali, the free-walking rat, that he was releasing the remarkable moment instead of playing with his friend.

Bartal finally heard the nucleus of the rats with a dye that appeared where the electrical signals were generated. He wanted to find out where that motivation to help comes from. (A the hungry rat is looking for pizza In a New York subway, the cortices of the liking would put stains on them.) The animals were rescued by taking parts of the brain and soon after seeing the ink and regions overlaid with pockets to indicate c-Fos. which parts of the brain spoke to each other.

Bartal put the calls into the rodent rescue missions at the motivation center and found a caller he knew: the anterior cingulate cortex. He suspects that it indicates a line of communication between empathy and reward that may be important for understanding compassionate behavior. But it’s still too early to “fully determine the entire microcircuit involved,” he says. “We’re working on that now.”

“It’s a wonderful research,” Stanford University neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky wrote in an email to WIRED. Sapolsky, who was not involved in the research, wrote the book Behave: The Biology of the Human on the Best and Worst, which describes what motivates human behavior, that is, the category of “us” everywhere “them” versus.

The results of the group tell us a lot about ourselves, according to Sapolsky, because experts would predict the same results in the human brain: the separation of us / them, which makes the previous cingulate demands and feeds motivations. It would be impossible for him to perform specific brain experiments on humans, and when he shows that he is acting in rats, he seems to be bittersweet, in his opinion. The good news, written by Sapolsky, is: “The roots of our ability to help, to empathize are not the products of Sunday morning sermons. It is older than our humanity, it is older than our dominance; its heritage predates it as a species ”. The bad news is that our tendency toward those around us is also old.

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