The high level field of my current project is system neuroscience. What a abstract idea, right? Specifically, in this area, scientists are studying the internal mechanism of how our (or their) brain works, how we (or they) feel this infinite world and react.
We built a VR (virtual reality) system for mice. Naturally, they live in the dark, under ground or at night. Therefore, their vision might not be that helpful, instead, they rely more on their whiskers as an essential tool of navigation. Like we have a large projection of vision on our brain cortex, their whisker sensory projection also take a great importance on their brains. In our VR system, mice would be head-fixed and running on a spherical treadmill. Two “walls” react to mice’s movement, to let them feel they are running in a tunnel.
Because we can find the brain area (which we called “barrel”) that directly match the specific whisker, we use multielectrode neural probes to detect and record the electrical signals in this part from different depths. Meanwhile, we keep tracking of their trajectories on the treadmill and the movements of the whisker that correlate to the brain area we record. Having these information, we can find the inter-correction among them.
Philosophically, there were many questions originated from the tiny details of our daily life and we had never understood how or why. Now we are asking and trying to figure out.