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I Taught Rats to Drive. They Taught Me to Enjoy the Ride | Kelly Lambert | TED
I Taught Rats to Drive. They Taught Me to Enjoy the Ride | Kelly Lambert | TED
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0:04
When I first started teaching rats to drive cars,
0:07
I never dreamed that those little rodents would steer me
0:10
toward a surprisingly big discovery,
0:12
a lesson about the importance of joy in our lives.
0:15
It turns out that we had a lot to teach each other.
0:18
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
0:20
I'm a behavioral neuroscientist.
0:22
I’m interested in brains, behavior and environment
0:24
and how they influence one another.
0:27
For most of my career,
0:28
I've focused on the negative emotions:
0:30
fear, stress, anxiety, symptoms of depression,
0:34
and for good reason.
0:36
Depression rates remain unacceptably high,
0:39
and recent reports suggest that deaths of despair,
0:42
deaths related to suicide and addiction and loneliness,
0:46
are on the rise in the United States.
0:49
Even though we've invested a lot of research
0:51
and resources toward understanding mental illness,
0:54
it seems that we have a long way to go.
0:56
Perhaps we need some fresh perspectives in this area.
0:59
Several years ago, when I was writing my book “Lifting Depression,”
1:03
I started to investigate the connections between reward and physical effort.
1:08
I introduced this term "behaviorceuticals,"
1:10
the idea that we can intentionally change our behavior
1:14
to alter neurochemistry in therapeutic ways.
1:18
If you have enjoyed knitting or cooking
1:22
or producing a piece of art,
1:25
you've experienced your own dose of behaviorceuticals.
1:28
But that's anecdotal evidence.
1:30
I needed to take this to the lab and consult with my research colleagues,
1:34
that's the laboratory rats.
1:36
So we trained them to exert physical effort for Froot Loops,
1:41
and that's the currency of my lab.
1:43
They love Froot Loops, so they'll work for Froot Loops.
1:46
So we had about five weeks
1:48
where the animals had to connect physical effort,
1:51
digging up those Froot Loops.
1:53
And at the end of that time,
1:55
we saw that there was enhanced evidence of emotional resilience,
1:59
more effective coping strategies
2:01
and even signs of neuroplasticity,
2:04
this idea of the brain changing in response to the changing demands
2:07
of the life of the animal.
2:09
And that's traditionally thought to be good and healthy for the brain.
2:14
Now when we compared these animals to the control group,
2:17
this was a group that received the same number of Froot Loops,
2:20
but they didn't have to work for it.
2:22
We called this the Trust Fund Rats group,
2:25
and we did not see the benefits in these animals.
2:29
So it seemed to be more than just the reward.
2:32
It's our relationship with the reward
2:34
and perhaps the ability to control these rewards.
2:38
So this was interesting.
2:40
And we did a good bit of research
2:41
on what we call “effort-based reward protocol”
2:44
and found some interesting findings,
2:46
but I still found myself going back to these negative emotions,
2:50
especially chronic stress.
2:52
Investigating all the ways things can go wrong with brains.
2:56
But it took the rats to point me in the direction
2:58
of looking at what could go right.
3:01
Let me provide a little context here.
3:03
So those rats that I talked about, the driving rats,
3:06
in the beginning of the talk,
3:08
we originally trained them to drive to understand more about agency
3:12
and a sense of control and skill acquisition
3:15
on their brains and behavior.
3:18
And so we taught them to drive these rodent-operated vehicles,
3:21
or ROVs, as we call them.
3:24
And we found some interesting findings, and we published it.
3:28
But we quickly realized that this program of research
3:31
had a lot of potential for science outreach.
3:34
And this is something that we really need today.
3:37
So we decided to keep a group of rats trained up on driving
3:42
so that we could continue with this science outreach.
3:45
And they became little rodent celebrities.
3:47
They were in documentaries and newscasts and podcasts, and that was all great.
3:53
But I remember during the pandemic,
3:55
when all the students were gone, it was very quiet on campus,
3:58
and a few colleagues and I were taking turns going into the lab
4:01
to take care of the animals.
4:03
And I vividly remember this one morning,
4:07
I walked into the lab,
4:08
and I saw these rats run up to the front of the cage,
4:11
and they were reaching their little arms out
4:14
and jumping up and down.
4:15
And it looked like they were excited to see me, like little rat joy.
4:19
And it made me excited that they were excited to see me.
4:23
And on the heels of all the negative-emotion research
4:26
that I had conducted through the years,
4:28
and all the negativity of the pandemic,
4:30
I decided right then and there that whatever that was I was seeing,
4:34
I wanted to investigate it.
4:36
I wanted to know more.
4:37
But could a neuroscientist study something as complex as joy in a rat?
4:43
I went to the literature and was encouraged.
4:45
I even found a definition of joy in non-human animals:
4:49
“a brief and intense burst of activity
4:52
associated with a favored event or object.”
4:55
So when my husband and I would ask our little dog, Brody,
4:58
if he wanted to go for a walk or just showed him the leash
5:01
and saw him running around in circles
5:03
and jumping up and down and yelping endlessly,
5:06
that seemed to fit the definition of joy.
5:08
If I could see it in a dog,
5:10
I was encouraged that we could see it in the rats.
5:12
But I still needed a plan.
5:14
I landed on this idea of anticipation,
5:17
the time before an award,
5:19
because I knew that we could manipulate that time in the laboratory.
5:24
So I was encouraged and really fascinated by some research
5:29
conducted by scientists,
5:30
where they trained rats to press a bar to have cocaine delivered
5:34
directly to their brains.
5:36
And when the cocaine hit the brain,
5:38
their natural kind of feel-good neurochemical
5:41
known as dopamine, would rise.
5:43
But what was even more interesting
5:45
was when that rat would approach that bar, before the cocaine was there,
5:49
you'd also see this rise in dopamine.
5:52
It seemed that the brain was interpreting the reward
5:54
and the time before the reward in a similar manner.
5:58
It really makes me wonder what our Founding Fathers knew
6:02
when they emphasized life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
6:07
It's really interesting.
6:09
So we had an idea: anticipation.
6:11
We still needed to translate this
6:13
into something that we could use in the laboratory.
6:16
We came up with this protocol
6:17
that we referred to as “unpredictable positive event responses,” or UPERs,
6:22
in keeping with this behaviorceutical theme.
6:25
So this was pretty simple.
6:27
For about five weeks
6:28
we introduced the rats to three good things,
6:31
fun things, every day,
6:32
in an unpredictable order and time.
6:36
So they were exposed to a LEGO block,
6:38
and they had to wait 15 minutes to get that Froot Loop,
6:40
or a sunflower seed, they had to wait patiently to shell it,
6:43
or they were placed in a transport cage
6:46
and wheeled across the hallway into another space in the lab
6:51
where they got to play around, run around in what we called Rat Park.
6:56
And they had to wait in that transport cage for three minutes.
7:00
We were encouraged that we were on to something
7:02
when we started to observe the rats in that transport cage.
7:05
And we saw brief bursts of behavior, running around, they seemed so excited.
7:10
So we were encouraged that indeed,
7:12
we were influencing something that looked like joy,
7:15
or at least positive anticipation in these rats.
7:18
So what are we finding?
7:20
The results are still rolling in, but we're starting to see some trends.
7:24
If we expose these rats to a rat-optimism task,
7:27
and yes, there is such a thing,
7:30
we've seen that the males shift from a pessimistic strategy
7:33
to an optimistic strategy.
7:36
But we don't see that with the females.
7:38
They remain more reality-based in both groups.
7:41
(Laughter)
7:42
Now I should mention that the control group
7:45
for this bit of research
7:47
is a group that receives all the good things at once,
7:50
so they don’t have that anticipation period there.
7:53
So we’re not sure if that generalizes to humans, about the females,
7:57
but we need to pursue that further.
7:59
But the other results we see both in males and females,
8:03
and it is important to look at sex differences
8:05
when we’re doing this research,
8:07
so both males and females show increased and intense exploration,
8:11
as if they think they’re going to find something good,
8:13
when they're exploring a novel environment.
8:15
So we're very encouraged by these results.
8:18
And surprisingly, one day, a student ran into my office and said,
8:22
"Doctor Lambert,
8:23
why are the UPER-trained rats' tails sticking straight up?"
8:26
I thought, I've been working with rats for over three decades,
8:29
and I've never seen this or heard of it.
8:31
But I went to the literature, and I saw that some researchers
8:35
would inject an opioid into the animals,
8:39
and their tails would go up.
8:41
And I thought, oh my goodness,
8:42
maybe we're doing something with behaviorceuticals
8:44
that has been done with pharmaceuticals.
8:46
So this is something that we need to explore further.
8:49
This research made me think about some classic research
8:52
conducted in the 1950s by Curt Richter at Johns Hopkins University.
8:57
He was interested in swim behavior between lab rats and wild rats,
9:01
and he had some interesting laboratory conditions for this.
9:04
But in the swim tank, it was turbulent water,
9:06
so it was challenging.
9:08
And he saw that the lab rats could swim for hours or days.
9:11
They're great swimmers.
9:13
But the wild rats, when he trapped them,
9:16
brought them in and put them in the tank,
9:18
they sank immediately, dying.
9:21
And he was shocked by this
9:22
because it's tough living out there in the wild,
9:24
and he'd thought those wild rats would be more resilient.
9:27
He said it looked like they were just giving up.
9:30
But when he thought about the experiences of the lab rats and the wild rats,
9:34
he realized that those lab rats had been periodically picked up by human hands,
9:38
and their conditions had changed.
9:40
So there was some hope that if you didn't like what was going on now,
9:43
it could change.
9:44
But the wild rats hadn't had that experience.
9:47
So he devised this intervention
9:49
where his assistants would pick up the wild rats
9:52
from the restraining cage or from the water just once or twice.
9:56
And he ran the study again.
9:58
And he found that a majority of those wild rats at that time,
10:03
they went from dying to surviving.
10:05
And he said it was the hope of rescue that led them down that path.
10:11
It makes you think: is this important for humans?
10:14
There is a good bit of research to suggest
10:16
that hope and positive attitudes are important for health and longevity.
10:21
One of my favorite studies was conducted on Israeli children
10:26
who were very ill,
10:27
and they were part of the Make-A-Wish Foundation program,
10:30
and the researchers monitored their general physical health
10:34
and mental health outcomes
10:36
from the time they were told specifically what their wish was
10:39
to the time the wish was granted.
10:41
And that was about five months,
10:43
so they could extend that anticipatory time.
10:46
And they found that these outcomes improved,
10:49
to suggest that maybe their quality of life during that time was enhanced.
10:54
And when they compared it to the children who were in the queue to get a wish,
10:58
but they hadn't been told the specifics,
11:00
so they really couldn't wish specifically
11:02
and hope specifically for that to happen.
11:04
Hopefully, when those children received the details of their wish,
11:08
they also benefited from this.
11:10
So there's a lot of research to suggest that, yes,
11:14
those negative emotions are important to understand,
11:18
but these positive emotions are as well.
11:21
And when we step back and look at the brain
11:23
and everything that's going on during positive anticipation and joy,
11:29
you can see that there are a lot of different areas of the brain
11:34
that are on board or activated during this time.
11:37
Areas involved with processing reward
11:39
and monitoring internal feelings
11:42
and planning and movement
11:44
are all activated during this time of joy
11:48
and positive anticipation.
11:50
So with all of this evidence, behavioral, anecdotal, neurological,
11:54
suggesting that positive emotions are important,
11:58
this isn't always reflected in our culture.
12:01
It's really interesting to me
12:03
that we have a word for anticipating something negative,
12:06
it’s dread.
12:07
But to my knowledge,
12:09
I don't know that we have a word related to anticipating something positive.
12:13
But in the German language they do.
12:15
It's "vorfreude."
12:17
It means joyful anticipation.
12:19
Perhaps it's time for us to step up
12:21
and come up with our own word for joyful anticipation.
12:26
And personally, I find myself going back
12:28
to this Puritan work ethic too often
12:31
where we equate busyness and hard work with virtue.
12:35
And if I find an hour or two to watch Netflix or something I enjoy,
12:39
I often describe it as a "guilty pleasure."
12:42
But why does it have to be a guilty pleasure?
12:44
Far from an indulgence,
12:46
it's looking like these pleasure and positive events are important
12:51
and critical for healthy maintenance of our brains.
12:55
Let me end by going back to those driving rants.
12:57
A lot of people ask me, "Kelly, do they like to drive?
13:00
Do they enjoy driving?"
13:02
And my response has typically been,
13:03
"I can't give them a questionnaire, I don't really know, I think they do."
13:07
But we could ask them from a behavioral perspective.
13:10
And that's what we did recently.
13:11
We gave them a choice of walking to the Froot Loop tree,
13:14
that's what they drive to,
13:15
in a more efficient path,
13:17
or they could take a detour and backtrack and jump in the car
13:20
and drive to the rewards.
13:23
And I couldn't wait to see what they would do.
13:25
And what we found was a majority of the animals did indeed backtrack,
13:30
take a tour and jump into the car and drive to their Froot Loop rewards.
13:35
(Laughter)
13:37
And if you saw a human, jumping in the background,
13:41
that was me, jumping for joy
13:44
seeing rats choose pleasure or fun over efficiency.
13:48
(Laughter and applause)
13:53
I taught rats to drive cars,
13:55
but they taught me to enjoy the ride.
13:58
Thank you.
13:59
(Applause)
I Taught Rats to Drive. They Taught Me to Enjoy the Ride | Kelly Lambert | TED - Video học tiếng Anh
