In the end, even basic brain connectivity is different between rodents and primates, with primates having more specialized, sparsely connected brain regions.

academic.oup.com/cercor/artic...

To me, this reveals that most of our subjective experience of the world is driven by accurate, long distance vision.

Which rodents don't have - rats visual acuity is 1/30 to 1/60 of human's.

And then seeing again.

For me, this study of Marmoset hippocampus nails it. Primates don't have 'place cells' like rodents do, instead hippocampal cells encode where the monkeys look.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Seeing 😁

Ok, a bit more seriously, here is one example where Marmosets (and primates in general) vastly outperform rats at object recognition, especially when it involves mental rotation:

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I’d be the first to switch from NHPs to humans if I could decide where to record and do it under proper lab conditions.

And I might even see the day when brain electrodes are completely safe, and I can record from healthy volunteers.

But we’re not there yet (and it will take some 🐵s to get there).

I’m well aware of single-neuron recordings in human patients; but to date, they’ve been very restricted in terms of where you can record and under what conditions (and data quality, although Neuropixels and other electrodes could indeed change that dramatically)...

Such as which ones?

...and the initial technology was largely developed by working with non-human primates 🐒.

#animalresearch

What a timely coincidence: my lab recorded our first neurons from that region this week!

So, long live the HD cortex! 😁😉

Cheers authors! @apeyrache.bsky.social @desdemonafricker.bsky.social

Of course. It’s extraordinarily that we even need to have this discussion - again - I despair.