You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Hey, Shortwave is Regina Barbara here.

And today, our story starts with a rat scientist.

You know, I know we're not a big rat and they're not little humans.

But at a basic level, they have mostly all the same brain areas, neurochemicals like dopamine and serotonin and

plasticity kind of fertilizers that we look at. All of that is in a rat brain. That's Kelly Lambert.

She's a professor of behavioral neuroscience at the University of Richmond. And a while ago,

this colleague of hers, a cognitive scientist who's into

robotics and design, reached out with kind of a weird question. She sent an email one night,

and said, Kelly, can you teach a rat to drive a car? And I'd consider myself a serious-minded

neuroscientist. So my initial response was, why would I want to do that? But then, she reconsidered.

Once you start thinking about teaching a rat to drive a car, you can't not think about it. You

can't stop thinking about it. Fast forward to a couple years later, guess what this is.

If you guess that's the sound of a rat driving a tiny car, you're right.

Kelly's rats are in a lab at the University of Richmond zooming in these four-wheeled little

plastic boxes around this big arena.

Almost like a playpin around the entire room and then some kind of flooring that we put,

that we roll out that's a flat surface and it's black and white check so it kind of has this

raceway kind of idea. And we start the car on one end and at the other end is what we call

the fruit loop tree. And we have little straws with fruit loops

and they attach via marshmallows.

We do give them healthy food.

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