trying to cheer up the net

This might be a little bit dense at the start for most of my friends, but I found it so fascinating I have to link anyway. It’s a summary of a recently published study on empathy responses in mice. Basically, if a mouse sees (or, to a lesser extent, hears or smells) another mouse respond with fear to an environment, it will likely respond similarly. If the mice are siblings or mates, they are even more likely to respond. Further, the scientists doing the study had a few ideas about where this empathetic response would be located in the brain and performed genetic and pharmacological knockouts on the mice–and they were right about two of their three hypotheses. Via knockouts, they were essentially able to make sociopathic mice–mice who feel no empathy for others.

So basically, they made the Brain.