Question: How do you work withy mice?

Martha Havenith answered on 14 Jun 2015:

Ha, that’s a tricky question, mainly because there’s either a short or a very long answer to it. 🙂 Roughly speaking, I do two things with my mice:
1) I teach them computer games to test their vision – that involves getting them used to getting fed by you and carried around in your hand (and in my case getting talked to as well, though that’s more for my benefit than for the mice 🙂 ). So that part is very fun and actually somewhat similar to pet training.
2) I implant small electrodes in the mouse’s brain to be able to record (and change) the brain activity while the mouse is playing the computer games. This means I put the animal under anaesthesia and glue an electrode onto its skull, then I drill a super-small hole in the skull so the electrode can go into the brain. When the mouse wakes up I give it pain killers for a few days to make sure it doesn’t have headaches from the skull drilling. After that, the mouse won’t really notice the electrodes, because the brain doesn’t feel touch or pain. This part of the work involves being really precise with your hands, because all the pieces you work with are much smaller than 1 mm.
Let me know if you want to know more!