Question: If your mice experiments are successful, would you ever test this on bigger animals, or even humans?

Martha Havenith answered on 22 Jun 2015:

Hey phoebs,
I wrote some more about that in these related questions:

/lutetiumj15-zone/2015/06/21/what-are-you-panning-to-do-with-the-information-that-you-find/

/lutetiumj15-zone/2015/06/21/what-are-you-ging-to-do-with-the-information-that-you-recive-will-you-be-using-human-trials/

The important bit is that our experiments hopefully help us understand better how neurons communicate. We may even find activity patterns that make the brain better at using information. If that happens it would be brilliant, and it would be great to start testing if things work the same way in other animals… But! 🙂 Especially in humans, we would only want to try similar techniques if we know they would be useful to the person and definitely not harm them. And to get all that figured out is lots of work, often decades of work. It’s a bit like the difference between understanding electricity in principle, and building a lamp from scratch. It would take different materials, different people with different skills, and lots of trying!

Also, if we find something that should be tried in larger animals and/or humans, and if we make sure that those experiment are definitely safe, it would still most likely not be me who does it. Experiments in different animals take pretty different skills and equipment (just imagine the difference between a mouse surgery and a human surgery!). So if anything, our results can hopefully inspire a different lab to try similar experiments in other animals, or find a related test that can be done in humans.