Intelligence-Augmented Rat Cyborgs in Maze Solving

It's a deeply weird paper.

From the title, it sounds like they've somehow augmented the rat so that it can learn mazes faster. However, the actual work is a lot less exciting. The rat has three electrodes implanted, one in the left somatosensory cortex, one in the right somatosensory cortex, and one in the medial forebrain bundle, and these electrodes are used to "drive" the rat through the maze.

This could still be cool, except for the fact that the rat has to be trained to (e.g.) turn left when the left S1 electrode is stimulating. I'm not a rat, but stimulating left S1 should feel like something was touching part of the rat's right side* and vice versa. Thus, they have trained the rat to move based on tactile cues and, when these cues happen to correspond to the maze layout, the rat does a bit better.

In principle, you could improve the rat's performance in the same way by solving the maze yourself and tapping its sides with a stick, but that's not nearly as sexy-sounding.

Agreed. On another note, some of the research they referenced here is that of O'Keefe, Moser & Moser [0] which was absolutely groundbreaking. It dealt with decoding the neural signatures rats produce when navigating rooms -- allowing us to peek into their "inner coordinate system," in a way. Perhaps there are interesting questions to be asked about augmented intelligence when approaching spatial tasks from this kind of perspective.

[0]: http://www.nature.com/news/nobel-prize-for-decoding-brain-s-...