The self-disciplined mouse that loves music

The musical mouse that makes itself happy. Via Event Horizon, who adds :

"Something here about the autonomous self-propagation of complex systems and behaviour through (literal) positive feedback mechanisms. If it happens at the level of brains, I doubt whether we should be very surprised that it also happens at the level of those aggregated social, cultural and ideological systems composed of large numbers of brains and their collective activities."


“It’s no secret that we derive pleasure from doing things we enjoy, such as playing our favourite video game,” said Prof. Costa, “These results reveal that the brain learns which activity patterns lead to feel-good sensations, and reshapes itself to more efficiently reproduce those patterns.”

The team used a brain machine interface which transformed the electrical activity of groups of neurons in the motor cortex with the production of musical notes. If the mouse learned to produce the right notes in the correct order by coordinating is neuronal activity, its ventral tegmental area dopamine neurons would be activated via light stimulation.

k... outreach people, use simpler terms please. Basically the mouse's own brain would trigger the release of a nice chemical if it managed to control itself to (in essence) whistle a jaunty tune. That's how I read it, anyway.

Using this ‘closed-loop’ self-stimulation system the group could observe neural reinforcement taking place as the mice learned to coordinate their brain cell activity to play the correct sequence of notes. “In essence, the mice learned to repeat the same pattern of brain activity that had been evoked previously by hearing those musical notes,” said Vivek Athalye, a doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley and the paper’s co-first author.

So, if I have this correct, the mouse learns to mentally amuse itself, and even alters its brain to make this more efficient. I seem to recall that this was already known from human neuroscience though, with more complex (but often repeated) tasks using less power than that simpler (but less frequently used) ones. I wasn't clear if this means an increased pursuit of such tasks for the dopamine reward or not.

https://www.technologynetworks.com/neuroscience/articles/evidence-for-a-neural-law-of-effect-how-the-brain-pursues-pleasure-298103