Mapping Bat Cognition in the Wild

This is our second episode of Wild Minds, our new mini-series exploring cognitive diversity and natural behaviour through conversations with leading researchers working at the intersection of ecology, evolution, and neuroscience.

In this episode, we are joined by ⁠Dr. Saikat Ray, a postdoctoral fellow at the Weizmann Institute of Science who researches how the brain represents space and social interactions under naturalistic conditions. Saikat is one of the pioneering scientists to use electrophysiological recordings of brain activity in animals freely moving in the wild, and has used this to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying spatial navigation in freely flying bats, and how this compares in the lab and in the wild.

We speak with Saikat about the value and reality of studying neuroscience in the wild, the main determinants of spatial cognition in bats, and the links between social and spatial experiences.

From Thomas Nagel’s What Is It Like to Be a Bat? (1972):

“Bats, although more closely related to us than those other species, nevertheless present a range of activity and a sensory apparatus so different from ours that the problem I want to pose is exceptionally vivid … the fact that we cannot expect ever to accommodate in our language a detailed description of Martian or bat phenomenology should not lead us to dismiss as meaningless the claim that bats and Martians have experiences fully comparable in richness of detail to our own.”

About The Guest

Saikat completed a BSc in electrical engineering followed by a PhD in neuroscience at the Humboldt University of Berlin where he researched the development and organisation of the medial entorhinal cortex, a brain area important for spatial navigation and memory. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow in Nachum Ulanovsky's lab at the Weizmann Institute of Science.

Useful scientific resources

<- from Head-direction cells as a neural compass in bats navigating outdoors on a remote oceanic island

Other papers about social dynamics in bats:

• Hippocampal coding of identity, sex, hierarchy, and affiliation in a social group of wild fruit bats

• Structure, Dynamics, and Neural Codes in a Bat Social Network

We also discussed a brief side quest that Saikat did researching seasonal plasticity of the cortex in shrew brains: Seasonal plasticity in the adult somatosensory cortex