As a tasty paramecium flits around the head of a hungry fish, nerve cells in the fish’s brain track the prey and flicker in response. This reaction, caught in real time by scientists, helps illuminate how brains perceive the outside world.
To catch a glimpse inside a larval zebra fish’s brain as it stalks a paramecium, Koichi Kawakami of the National Institute of Genetics in Mishima, Japan, and colleagues genetically engineered the fish so its neurons would glow when excited.
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