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How Virtual Reality Unveiled a Unique Brain Wave That Could Boost Learning - SingularityHub
As the rats ran down a short balance beam, stopping occasionally to poke their noses at a water fountain, their brains knew something was off.
Inside the hippocampus, a brain region that documents the stories of your life, neurons sparked a strange type of electrical wave that washed over the region, altering its normal rhythm.
You see, the rats were running in virtual reality (VR), one so rich and lifelike that the rats “love to jump in and happily play games,” said Dr. Mayank R. Mehta at the University of California, Los Angeles, and senior author on a new paper in Nature Neuroscience. And shockingly, their brains responded to VR with unique activity that could impact how we learn, remember, and even treat memory disorders such as Alzheimer’s.
“This is a new technology that has tremendous potential,” said Mehta. “We have entered a new territory.”
As the rats ran down a short balance beam, stopping occasionally to poke their noses at a water fountain, their brains knew something was off.
Inside the hippocampus, a brain region that documents the stories of your life, neurons sparked a strange type of electrical wave that washed over the region, altering its normal rhythm.
You see, the rats were running in virtual reality (VR), one so rich and lifelike that the rats “love to jump in and happily play games,” said Dr. Mayank R. Mehta at the University of California, Los Angeles, and senior author on a new paper in Nature Neuroscience. And shockingly, their brains responded to VR with unique activity that could impact how we learn, remember, and even treat memory disorders such as Alzheimer’s.
“This is a new technology that has tremendous potential,” said Mehta. “We have entered a new territory.”