Nobel Prize Committee: Leave the GPS Unit at Home!

I'll just silently stare at the 800lb gorilla in the room and not say an un pc word.

Fascinating.

Now what are we going to do with all of those useless satellites? :)

Lots of animal, at the very least, have an internal integrating accelerometer inside – sort of like he crappy one inside you iphone, that helps to determine directional change independently of other queues. We humans have particularly crappy ones, but it turn out that rats have very good ones. I spent several month as a visiting fellow in a brain lab at University of Arizona that had some people working on this. The experimental setup was amusing when viewed from the outside. Rat were placed in a largish room with a platform in the middle that rotated. Around the platform was a round pool of water that was made opaque like milk so no visual clues could interfere, and just under the water was a platform the rat could swim too. All the walls and ceiling of the chamber were also painted white for the same reason. I forget the exact details after a couple of decades, but the task was something like step on the submerged platform and open the escape path from the water – the rat had previously learned how to do this.

So…Rat dropped on center platform. Lights turned off. Center platform rotated quickly a certain amount (different speeds and times of rotation). Lights turned on again. So basically, how well is the rat able to find hidden platform in lake using its internal accelerometer after being spun around. Rats turn out to be MUCH better than people at this – probably because they are designed to work well in the dark.

Anyway, this is the kind of thing that looks from the outside, especially from the point of an idiot congressman that barely finished high school, to be silly. But is not. Of course since they were interested in the neural basis for this ability, once they established a baseline, they of course would inevitably want to see how the performance was affected by various drugs, and I'm sure one of them would have been alcohol! Yeah, some things look bad from the outside – especially when the experiments are usually performed by college kids that work for the professor doing the research. Something about finding you way home from the campus party come to mind…