If you'd asked me 10 years ago
when I started my lab that I'll be,
you know - I'll have a one-kilometre tunnel
and recording from a whole colony of bats
I'll tell you you're nuts.
I'm studying the hippocampal formation
a set of brain areas that have to do
with learning and memory.
And I'm studying those brain areas in
somewhat unusual animal models - in bats.
Bats, I think they are very cute.
The bats that we work with, Egyptian fruit bats
have these interesting behaviours
that we try to utilize
and that give advantages over
the standard animal models which are mice and rats.
So for example if we want to ask questions about how
3D space - three dimensional space is represented in the brain
bats are flying mammals so obviously they're a good choice for that.
Also another advantage is that
bats have two distal sensory systems - vision and echolocation.
We can trade-off these two senses and ask how the same spaces are represented under
these two, systems which are difficult to do in rats or mice.
We also ask questions about how very large spaces are represented in the brain.
So we've built this long tunnel - 200 metre long - and we are building this year an
even longer tunnel - almost 1 kilometre long. And we have bats flying there
you know 100, 120 times back and forth
while we record neurons in their brain
and we see, you know, very different representation in this enormous space.
So we implant these small electrodes in the bats that allow us to record
the activity of single neurons in those brain areas.
And we have developed these small wireless electrophysiology devices
called neural loggers, that are really small and sit on top of the animal,
which allow us to record wirelessly in a bat as its flying around.
And then we can have them fly in a large flight room
or in various large-scale spaces that we have built, and study
their representation of space. We can also have bats interacting and ask more
social questions on the bats.
What I'm really interested in is the neural basis of natural behaviours.
You know neuroscience has traditionally focused on either, of course
anaesthetised animals, animals that don't behave at all.
Or if they're you know doing behaviours they're doing highly controlled behaviours
you know lever pressing or nose poking in some very,
you know 30 centimetre size box.
The big plus size of side of it is it is highly controlled
so you can get very repeated very controlled experiments.
The minus side of it is it's very far removed from natural behaviour
from what the brain evolved to actually do outdoors. And so I really
believe, in addition to having those highly controlled experiments, we should
ideally record the same neurons or at least from the same brain areas
from an animal behaving in a more natural situation.
Now that the technology allows it that we have technology for
wireless electrophysiology for recording for freely moving animals.
You know from wireless optogenetics, camera arrays with microphones
with movement sensors all sorts of devices were not available until a few years ago.
we can really study the neural basis of behaviour
for the first time for real.