Rat Twitching is Establishment of Connection Between Brain and Body

Involuntary movements are a vital contributor to the development of sensorimotor systems. This is the new finding that is being suggested by the researchers at The University of Lowa. The whiskers of newborn rats twitch as they sleep, and that could open the door to new understandings about the intimate connections between brain and body.

"We found that even whiskers twitch during sleep -- and they do so in infant rats long before they move their whiskers in the coordinated fashion known as whisking," said Mark Blumberg of The University of Iowa. "This discovery opens up new avenues for investigating how we develop critical connections between the sensors in our body and the parts of the brain that interpret and organize sensory information."

They noticed how the whiskers of the baby rats twitch in a rapid and a complex manner. These twitches during the sleep are linked to bursts of activities in the brain which aren't observed when rats are awake. Even the eyes and limbs twitch simultaneously during the sleep.

"Spontaneous motor activity can play many different roles in early development and even throughout life," Blumberg explains. "It can be a source of brain activity in general as well as a source of highly specific, patterned activity that can help shape specific neural circuits."

Each individual whisker maps to discrete regions of the brain that process information from that individual whisker alone. The whisker-specific brain regions form arrangements that map to the physical arrangements of whiskers on the snout.

 This finding gives us a new appreciation for the important work infants are doing even as they sleep.

"One of the jobs of the infant is to learn how all the parts of the body function even as those parts are growing in size and proportion," Blumberg says. "It is a difficult job."

The findings along with the video of those whisker twitches on Oct. 18 in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication.