What rat drivers can teach us about mental health.

“Blacktail” was up first, taking a few seconds to sniff her surroundings before placing her hand on the lever and zooming in.

After storming to the finish line, she eats a well-earned Froot Loop hanging from the “Medicine Tree”.

Black Tails is one of the University of Richmond’s Rat Drivers — a group that first wowed the world in 2019 with their ability to drive tiny cars.

Now, the mice serve as ambassadors for the school’s behavioral neuroscience lab, led by Professor Kelly Lambert.

“It draws people’s attention to how smart and learnable these animals are,” explains Lambert, who has to balance her love for the furry speedsters with the need for a scientific dissection — just their names with sharpie markers on their tails.

The idea for Rat Race started as a playful challenge from a colleague.

But far from being a novel act, the animals are part of a boundary-pushing project exploring the ways in which environmental enrichment shapes the brain — and in turn, has the potential to solve human mental health challenges.

For Lambert, one of the biggest failures of modern medicine is the inability to cure mental illness with drugs, despite the huge profits pharmaceutical companies make.

These drug approaches have faced further scrutiny after a groundbreaking study published in July questioned the theory that chemical imbalances, specifically serotonin deficiency, cause depression.

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The root of their labor

Instead, Lambert sees behavioral therapy as the key to treating the brain, which is where the study of fellow mammals should go.

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“From the womb to the grave, our brains are changing,” she says. “If we have some kind of active life, that’s probably important and related to depression.”

In her previous experiment, she divided rats into groups of “workers,” who were simply given the effort-based reward task of digging through mounds of dirt for the Froot Loop — or a control group of “trust fund” rats. It accommodates.

When challenged with stressful tasks, worker rats stayed in what psychologists call “learned helplessness” for longer than they were allowed to.

And when they did the swimming task, the worker rats showed more emotional strength, as evidenced by a higher ratio of the hormone dystrophy androsterone to cortisol.

Mice that learned to drive had biomarkers of greater resilience and reduced stress—which Lambert says may be linked to the satisfaction of mastering a new skill, like a person mastering a new piano piece.

Research lab specialist Olivia Harding said: “In the wild they develop routes that they can use over and over again, and we wanted to see if they could continue this great navigational ability in a vehicle.

The training wasn’t easy: the team first tried to get the mice to shake the steering wheel with their noses, before the animals found it, standing on their hind legs and preferring to use their front paws.

Early car models required the mice to touch wires placed in front, left or right of the car, completing a mild electrical circuit corresponding to the direction of movement.

But now they go on thrill rides on robotically designed elevators.

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When their vehicles were placed in an unfamiliar location, away from the treat, the mice learned to redirect their vehicles and move toward the reward, indicating advanced cognitive processing at work.

Today’s female drivers with black tails and multi-colored tails clearly exhibit “expectant” behavior as men walk into the room and try to climb their walls.

But, just like humans, not all rats have the same interests: while some individuals seemed eager to ride for fun, others did so only for maintenance, and still others couldn’t be co-opted to participate at all.

In the wild

Female mice in particular have long been neglected in science, because earlier generations of researchers thought their four-day estrous cycle would muddy research results.

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It’s a trend Lambert is determined to reverse with her experiments, which can deprive scientists of women-specific insights — and is now a necessary condition for federal aid.

Early in her career, Lambert realized that studying mice living in “unenriched” environments without obstacle courses and activities in a cage was similar to studying humans in isolation.

In her driving study, mice raised in enriched cages were significantly better at driving tasks.

Her latest paper focused on the differences between lab mice and those caught in the wild — finding the latter had larger brains, more brain cells, larger spleens to fight disease and higher stress levels than their captive relatives.

“It blows my mind,” she said, that there was little interest in understanding these differences in terms of their potential impact on human medicine.

It also raises an interesting philosophical question: Are we like caged lab rats, enriched lab rats, or wild rats?

“I feel a little closer to a trained lab rat than a wild rat,” Moses Lambert.

But wild mice that must dig for food and avoid predators every day of their lives — just like our ancestors — may have something to teach us about mental toughness.

© 2022 AFP