The details in the provided article are pretty slim (and I can't get the paper link to load for some reason), but it sounds like the rats are sharing learned information through electrodes. While I'm pretty skeptical of the results (without being able to see the paper itself), the first sentence of the last paragraph of the article linked is pretty exciting: I know that Nicolelis has been doing a lot of exciting things related to neuroscience for a while, and that there are certainly a good number of people in academia interested in his research. But I'd like to see the original paper before I come to any conclusions -- this stuff seems like science fiction.One of Nicolelis' most fascinating observations was that the rodents figured out a way to divide their workload among the group so one wasn't bogged down with more work than the other.
Here's the paper in pdf. Don't know if you'll be able to access that any easier. If not, I've uploaded it to pdfsr. You'll need flash player to view it. I don't have it on my work computer, so I can't review the file there.
Thanks, the second link worked for me. I think it might be because I'm not on my University wifi at the moment.