If anyone is wondering, the lasers aren't an essential element of what's going on here; the point is that <i>targeted electrical stimulation</i> to a certain area of the brain causes this behaviour. With areas on the brain surface, you could just use a wire for this.<p>For areas deeper in the brain, however, you can't exactly feed a wire in there without destroying things, so instead, you use optogenetics: you get a virus to be the "end" of the wire (finding the right area of the brain to live in, and then converting light pulses into electrical pulses) and then you point a laser at the brain and the viruses "go off" in response. The virus is essentially just serving as one half of an electrical optoisolator.<p>As an added benefit for the optogenetic approach, the electrical pulses released by the viruses are each local to their host cells, so they won't have nearly as much "bleed-over" into surrounding tissue as you'd see with one strong pulse from a wire.
"First, they infected the mice with a virus that made the neurons in their brains sensitive to blue light."<p>They can do this? This is amazing to me!<p>It also makes me a little afraid that I'll get infected by a virus and mind controlled.
They know they are playing with fire here. You want zombie mice? because this is how you get zombie mice.<p>"This left him fairly certain that the experiments were triggering predation, not hunger or aggression."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this sounds like the plot of "Kingsman"<p>Warning violent Movie ahead: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25683IE5v9g" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25683IE5v9g</a>
> Because the central amygdala is involved in so many different behaviours, she says, future research needs to tease out the precise neuronal circuits involved in hunting. “The central amygdala has been linked to escape and flight — this is completely different from that.”<p>In other words, don't be precise and your soldiers will run away instead of attacking the enemy.