“I taught rats to drive cars, but they taught me to enjoy the ride” #TEDTalks

When I first started teaching rats to drive cars, I never dreamed that those little rodents would steer me toward a surprisingly big discovery, a lesson about the importance of joy in our lives. We originally trained them to drive to understand more about agency and a sense of control and skill acquisition on their brains and behavior. And we so we taught them to drive these rodent operated vehicles or ROVs as we call them. and we found some interesting findings and we published it. But we quickly realized that this program of research had a lot of potential for science outreach and this is something that we really need uh today. So we decided to keep a group of rats trained up on driving so that we could continue with this science outreach. And they became little rodent celebrities. We trained them to exert physical effort for Froot Loops. And that's the currency of my lab. They love Froot Loops. So, they work for Froot Loops. So, we had about five weeks where the animals had to connect physical effort digging up those Froot Loops. But could a neuroscientist study something as complex as joy in a rat? And that's what we did recently. We gave them a choice of walking to the Froot Loop tree, that's what they drive to, uh, in a more efficient path, or they could take a detour and backtrack and jump in the car and drive to the rewards. and I couldn't wait to see what they would do. And what we found was a majority of the animals did indeed uh backtrack, take a tour, and jump into the car and drive to their Froot Loop rewards. Uh and if you saw a human jumping in the background, that was me uh jumping for joy, seeing rats choose pleasure or fun over efficiency. I taught rats to drive cars, but they taught me to enjoy the