Inside the mind of an animal

Inside the mind of an animal

Emotion, aggression, desire: inside the mind of an animal

Neuroscientists wanting to understand the brain have conventionally studied how its networks of cells respond to sensory information and how they generate behaviour, such as movement or speech. But they couldn’t look in detail at the important bit in between — the vast quantities of neuronal activity that conceal patterns representing the animal’s mood or desires, and which help it to calibrate its behaviour. A slew of techniques that allow scientists to scrutinize huge piles of data is starting to change that.

Nature | 12 min read