Communications of the ACM
Living in 'the Matrix' Requires Less Brain Power
A specific type of neuron in rat brains fires differently when test animals are subjected to virtual reality, than they do in actual reality.
Credit: Mark Turner
Neurons called place cells in rat brains function differently when the animals are in virtual reality than when they are in the real world, according to researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Place cells, which fire in response to specific physical locations in the outside world, are triggered to fire via visual cues, self-motion cues on how the body moves in space, and proximal cues such as the smell of a bakery.
UCLA neurophysicist Mayank Mehta studied the place cells in rats running along a real, linear track compared with place cells in rats running in virtual reality, and found that the place cells in the virtual reality rats fired at only about half the rate of the real-world rats. The place cells also behaved differently in virtual reality. Instead of firing a second time when the rat reached the same point on its return trip, the place cells fired when the rat was two steps away from the track's opposite end.
This suggests that instead of encoding a position in absolute space as happens in the real world, the place cells in virtual reality record relative distance, which Mehta attributes to the absence of proximal cues in the virtual environment.
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