Israeli Scientists Taught a Goldfish to Drive (It Worked)

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]This is a goldfish driving a car on land in Israel.

[00:00:07]Not a toy, not a video game, a real peer-reviewed scientific experiment [music] published in an academic journal conducted by researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

[00:00:23]They built a robotic vehicle, put a fish tank on top of it, placed a goldfish inside, and taught it to navigate the vehicle around obstacles to reach a target on the wall. The fish learned in [music] days. It navigated around obstacles. It ignored fake targets designed to confuse it. It drove better than some people I know.

[00:00:51]But here is what nobody told you about this experiment. The driving was not the point. What the fish found by driving reroute something fundamental about how scientists understand [music] all animal brains, including yours.

[00:01:10]Welcome back to Grand Structures.

[00:01:14]Let's start with engineering because [music] building a car that a fish can drive is surprisingly a grand structure in miniature. The researchers built what they called a fish-operated vehicle, FOV.

[00:01:29]The main part was a fish tank attached to a moving platform with four motorized wheels. Attached to the top was a lidar system, the same laser mapping technology used in self-driving cars.

[00:01:44]Tracking the fish's position inside the tank continuously. When the system detected the fish [music] swimming toward one side of the tank, it sent a signal to move the vehicle in that direction. The fish swims left, the car goes left. The fish swims right, the car goes right.

[00:02:04]Six goldfish participated, each receiving around 10 driving lessons. A colorful target was placed on the wall at the opposite end of the room. Every time a fish successfully navigated the vehicle to the target, it received a food reward. The results surprised even the researchers. "It doesn't take the fish a long time to learn," said researcher Shachar Givon. "They're confused at first. They don't know what's going on, but they're [music] very quick to realize there is a correlation between their movement and the movement of the machine.

[00:02:41]And there was individual variation.

[00:02:44]There were very good fish that were doing excellent, and there were mediocre fish that showed control of the vehicle, but were less proficient," said biology professor Ronen Segev.

[00:02:55]In other words, some goldfish are better drivers than others, which means that somewhere in a laboratory in [music] Beer Sheva, there is a goldfish who failed its driving test.

[00:03:08]Here is where the experiment stops being funny and starts being extraordinary, because the reason Israeli scientists taught a goldfish to drive was not to make a viral video, although it did make one. It was to answer a question that neuroscientists have been debating for decades.

[00:03:28]The question is navigation a universal ability, or is it specific to the environment an animal evolved in? In other words, does a fish know how to navigate because it lives in water, or [music] does it know how to navigate because its brain contains a universal spatial reasoning system that [music] works anywhere?

[00:03:51]This matters enormously because [music] if navigation is environment-specific, then a fish taken out of water should be completely lost, unable to orient itself in a three-dimensional space it never evolved for. But if navigation is universal, built into the basic architecture of animal brains, then a fish should be able to navigate on land just as well as in water. Different environment, same cognitive tool. The study's conclusion was direct. The findings suggest that the [music] way space is represented in the fish brain and the strategies it uses may be as successful in a terrestrial environment as they are in an aquatic one. This hints at universality in the way space is represented across environments.

[00:04:42]Translation, the goldfish navigated land-based space using the same cognitive system it uses to navigate water. The environment changed completely. The navigation system worked anyway. [music] Which means the navigation system is not built for water. It is built for space itself. Any space, [music] any environment. And if that is true for a goldfish, it is likely true for every animal with a brain, including you. The system you use to navigate a city, find your car in a parking lot, remember where you put your keys, may be the same fundamental cognitive architecture that a goldfish uses to find [music] food in a river.

[00:05:29]400 million years of separate [music] evolution, one shared solution.

[00:05:36]The finding that navigation may be universal across species is not just philosophically interesting. It has immediate practical implications in three fields that affect millions of people. [music] First, Alzheimer's disease.

[00:05:53]One of the earliest and most consistent symptoms of Alzheimer's is getting lost, the inability to navigate familiar environments.

[00:06:03]Patients who have lived in the same house for decades suddenly cannot find the bathroom. They get lost on streets they have walked for years. This happens because Alzheimer's damages the hippocampus, the brain structure most associated with spatial navigation and memory.

[00:06:22]If the navigation system is truly universal across species, if goldfish, rats, birds, and humans all use the same fundamental architecture, then studying navigation failure in simpler animal models becomes directly relevant to understanding navigation failure in human disease. The goldfish that learns to drive a car is in a very real sense a model for understanding what goes wrong in the brain of an Alzheimer's patient.

[00:06:54]Second, autonomous vehicles.

[00:06:57]The navigation [music] algorithms powering self-driving cars, including Mobileye, the Israeli company we covered that invented self-driving vision, are inspired by animal navigation systems.

[00:07:10]The discovery that fish navigate land-based environments using the same cognitive tools as land animals provides new data points for how biological navigation actually works.

[00:07:24]Engineers building AI navigation systems are increasingly looking to biology for inspiration. The goldfish just gave [music] them new material.

[00:07:34]Third, animal migration.

[00:07:37]Understanding how fish navigate and confirming that their navigation system is domain independent has direct implications for understanding how fish migrate thousands of kilometers across open ocean to return to their exact birth rivers.

[00:07:55]If the navigation system works in any environment, [music] understanding its structure tells us something fundamental about how migration works. And migration management is critical for fisheries, ecosystems, and food security globally.

[00:08:12]Ben-Gurion University of the Negev is where this experiment happened, and it is not a coincidence that this particular university, in this particular desert city, keeps producing research that sounds impossible until you understand why they are asking the questions they ask. Ben-Gurion University was founded in 1969 with a specific mission, develop the [music] Negev. Its researchers study desert agriculture, water scarcity, solar energy, and the biology of life in [music] extreme environments because those are the problems of the desert they sit in. The same university whose alumni helped develop drip irrigation, the same university whose researchers grew crops in conditions that other agricultural scientists said were impossible. And now, the same university whose neuroscientists asked whether a fish could navigate outside its natural environment. The question sounds absurd, but it is the same question that all of Ben-Gurion University's best research asks. Can something function outside the environment it was built for? Can a desert [music] grow food? Can a fish navigate on land? Can a desert country become the world's most water-efficient nation? The answer, consistently from [music] this university in this desert, is yes, with the right engineering.

[00:09:43][music] Yes. Israeli scientists put a goldfish in a car and taught it to drive. The internet laughed, the scientific community paid attention, and what the goldfish revealed by successfully navigating an environment it was never built for may reshape how we understand animal brains, human disease, and the fundamental architecture of intelligence itself.

[00:10:13]The navigation system that got that goldfish to its pink target on the wall is the same system researchers now believe that gets salmon back to the river where they were born, that gets you home when the GPS fails, and that fails heartbreakingly in the brains of Alzheimer's patients who can no longer find their way home.

[00:10:37]One experiment, six goldfish, 10 driving lessons each, a peer-reviewed paper in a journal that most people have never heard of, and a finding that connects fish brains to human disease, animal migration to autonomous vehicles, and a laboratory in Beer Sheva to the fundamental question of what intelligence actually is.

[00:11:03]Israel put a million fish in the desert and grew food. Israel put a goldfish in a car and found a universal truth about animal intelligence. The fish are doing a lot of heavy lifting in this country.

[00:11:18]This is grand structures.

[00:11:21]Here is what I want to know. If a goldfish can learn to drive a car in days, what other [music] animal would you test next, and what environment would you put it in? Drop your answer below. And yes, I want the most creative answers you can think of. Subscribe to Grand Structures and watch our original fish video right after this because Israel has been doing impossible things with fish since long before they taught one to drive.