Rats Know How Teleportation Feels

A group of experts at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim were recently able to explain the teleportation effect rats feel. It was determined that certain neurons in the rodents' brains compete for dominance for precise periods of time.

The effect can be seen as the animals scamper through a known environment. At time, they can be seen pausing for precisely one eighth of a second, as several of their neural pathways each try to impose its own point of view of where the rat is.

A similar effect occurs when employees in a company descend from the elevator at the wrong floor. It could take a while before they figure out what is wrong, since the expected image does not fit the observed reality. The NUST team showed how this happens in rats.

The location data each of the neural pathways transmits are mutually exclusively, which is why the rats stop, explains team leader Edvard Moser, a neuroscientist at the university, as quoted by ScienceNOW.