Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
Speaker 1: when was the last time you saw a live rat? Ha? Ha?
Speaker 1: I saw a huge rat at the zoo once, Yeah,
Speaker 1: in in an exhibit. No, just running across the path.
Speaker 1: And that's not surprising, right, because the zoo has lots
Speaker 1: and lots of food at any animals dispose. Also, I'm
Speaker 1: sure that rats hang out there quite a bit. Okay,
Speaker 1: a little similarly, I last time I saw a live
Speaker 1: rat outside of the confines of a pet store was
Speaker 1: when I was taking the public transportation around here, Martha.
Speaker 1: The drain that is at times kind of a subway,
Speaker 1: and indeed I get to see a nice fat subway
Speaker 1: rat running around under the tracks, which for me is
Speaker 1: always kind of a treat because it, you know, it
Speaker 1: brings to mind more you know, opic ideals of the underworld. Um.
Speaker 1: And at the same time it's also I can't help
Speaker 1: but I think it's a little gross because obviously the
Speaker 1: rat is there because there's plenty of garbage. Dat well,
Speaker 1: there's something very outlaw and charming about these rats to
Speaker 1: dwelling in a subterranean world, right, and we tend to
Speaker 1: think of them more in really negative terms, thinking about
Speaker 1: them as vectors of disease. But as we're going to
Speaker 1: explore today, rats are one of the most successful species,
Speaker 1: and rats they're just like us that we have a
Speaker 1: lot in common with them. Indeed, now we don't want
Speaker 1: to completely discredit the whole disease vector thing because according
Speaker 1: to the CDC there that they're These are just some
Speaker 1: of the key diseases transmitted by rodents. There's a hantavirus,
Speaker 1: pulmonary syndrome, hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome, a loss of fever,
Speaker 1: a leptospirosis, lymphocitic chronomeningitis, o hemorrhage, fee ever, plague, rat
Speaker 1: bite fever, someone elis, someon elysis, and several South American
Speaker 1: arena viruses. Well, you know this is how I feel
Speaker 1: about being a rat. You probably want to have a
Speaker 1: heavy reputation like that, right because you're out there on
Speaker 1: the streets, the mean streets. You want to mean persona like, hey,
Speaker 1: I might accidentally give you some sort of plague or
Speaker 1: or not so accidentally so don't mess with me. And
Speaker 1: when you start to think about rats in this way,
Speaker 1: their survival instincts, you can really look at them as
Speaker 1: more of it's just this sort of pestilence underground, but
Speaker 1: more as the uh the largest collective holders of real
Speaker 1: estate in major metropolitan areas, specifically Manhattan, because we should
Speaker 1: really consider this rich life of the rat there, which
Speaker 1: arrives sometimes in the eighteen hundreds. We're talking about Rattus norvegicus,
Speaker 1: and it has made itself so ubiquitous that just it's
Speaker 1: very presence is sort of one of those defining features
Speaker 1: of New York City when you think about New York, right,
Speaker 1: and they have successfully lived off the detritus of humans.
Speaker 1: And you can follow droppings nearly anywhere if you want
Speaker 1: to write, and you'll find a path between walls, nod
Speaker 1: between bricks, and then just knowing that there's this whole
Speaker 1: other species, is life thriving beneath our feet or between
Speaker 1: our walls, and sometimes even coming up through our toilet bowl.
Speaker 1: I think about that in the middle of the night sometimes,
Speaker 1: and I have to admit, when I am in New York,
Speaker 1: if I don't see a rat, I feel a little
Speaker 1: let down like it's it's it should's part of the experience,
Speaker 1: you know. So if there's not one appearing naturally, I
Speaker 1: kind of want to hire somebody to just let a
Speaker 1: rat trained one run across the street in front of me. UM. Now,
Speaker 1: when you get into the exact numbers of rats in Manhattan,
Speaker 1: I bring this up because it was recently in the news. UM.
Speaker 1: Past estimates of range from an extreme infestation of twenty
Speaker 1: eight million rats to uh the other more conservative estimates
Speaker 1: of eight point four million UM. But recently there's a
Speaker 1: study that came out from Jonathan Arbach, a PhD candidate
Speaker 1: at Columbia University, and he's crunched the numbers and he
Speaker 1: thinks that it's less than that, probably more like two million.
Speaker 1: But basically, any way you shake it, we're talking about
Speaker 1: a lot of rats living in this great metropolis. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a decent sized population. And it's really easy to
Speaker 1: start actually going the rout a two year oute to
Speaker 1: and projecting, um, your human qualities are our human qualities
Speaker 1: onto them. UM. But as we will explore later on,
Speaker 1: there really are a lot of parallels between routes and humans. UM.
Speaker 1: But one of the things that's often overlooked is that
Speaker 1: there's quite a bit of contribution from rats, albeit not voluntarily.
Speaker 1: That's right. We're getting on the ratitui area and getting
Speaker 1: into more of the secretive nim area here, right. Um.
Speaker 1: As it turns out, of all lab animals are mice
Speaker 1: and rats according to the Foundation for Biomedical Research, and
Speaker 1: that is that is quite a lot. Because you think
Speaker 1: of lab animals, right um. You know, you also tend
Speaker 1: to throw in chimps and you think of experiments on
Speaker 1: rabbits or what have you, but or even some things
Speaker 1: like ecoli and some of the jazzery experiments that we've
Speaker 1: discussed here in the past. But when you come back
Speaker 1: down to it, it's the rodents that are carrying most
Speaker 1: of the load. And why is this, Well, a lot
Speaker 1: of it has to do with convenience, right. Rats are
Speaker 1: small in size, they're easily housed, you can easily maintain
Speaker 1: them in captivity, and they're fairly adaptive to new surroundings.
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously there are plenty of species out there
Speaker 1: that that you cannot keep in captivity. They just do
Speaker 1: not survive. They just completely fail if you try to
Speaker 1: house them. The rat, however, one of its skills as adaptations. Hey,
Speaker 1: it adapts well to this captive lifestyle. Also, rats reproduce
Speaker 1: like crazy, and they don't live more than two or
Speaker 1: three years. So if you have a study and you
Speaker 1: need to look at several generations all the creature to see, uh,
Speaker 1: see how your studies panning out, you can do that
Speaker 1: in a short period of human time. You know. Now,
Speaker 1: they're they're no ecoli. Heck, the E. Coli long term
Speaker 1: evolution experiment that we've discussed here before has seen more
Speaker 1: than fifty thou generations passed in just twenty five years.
Speaker 1: But rats and mice boast other key advantages. They're also
Speaker 1: cheap to acquire. You can buy lab mice and rats
Speaker 1: in bulk from commercial suppliers, so there's no hanging around
Speaker 1: around looking like a creepy person at the local pet store,
Speaker 1: you know, with your burlap sack. And then when it
Speaker 1: comes to actually handling them, uh, this is a pretty
Speaker 1: uh mild tempered creature. You can reach into the cage,
Speaker 1: you can get them out, you can you can handle them.
Speaker 1: You don't need a you know, an electric prod to
Speaker 1: deal with the lab rat. Right, They're highly portable and
Speaker 1: their genetic biological and behavior characteristics closely resemble those of humans,
Speaker 1: making them really ideal to study. So, as you mentioned,
Speaker 1: because they reproduce so quickly, you can tinker around with genetics,
Speaker 1: and within just a couple of generations you can you
Speaker 1: can begin to take some sort of hypothesis and then
Speaker 1: put it into study by tinkering with the genetics and
Speaker 1: seeing what the outcome is, which of course informs what
Speaker 1: we're trying to do medically with humans. And when I
Speaker 1: say informing, I mean really the contributions to a ton
Speaker 1: of diseases and conditions that we have been studying through wraps.
Speaker 1: And what exactly have they helped with? Well, according to
Speaker 1: Life Sciences article wy do medical researchers use mice, they've
Speaker 1: assisted with the following uh standing in as human models, hypertension, diabetes, cataracts, obesity, seizures,
Speaker 1: respiratory problems, deafness, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, cancer, cystic fibrosis,
Speaker 1: HIV and AIDS, heart disease, muscular drift dystrophy, and spinal
Speaker 1: cord injuries. And in addition to all that, we regularly
Speaker 1: turned to mice for varying studies that concern behavioral sensory, aging, nutrition,
Speaker 1: and genetic studies, as well as the treatment of drug addictions. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that's quite a resume that that rats and mice have.
Speaker 1: Now consider that rats were first used in the lab
Speaker 1: at the turn of the century by researchers believe in
Speaker 1: Chicago and at Clark University. So at first it was
Speaker 1: just the humble rodent maze that they would run through
Speaker 1: to try to give us some ideas about the more
Speaker 1: behavioral aspects of rats. Now fast forward to today and
Speaker 1: they're actually occupying a far loftier space and studies. And
Speaker 1: one of the loftiest uh that I could think of
Speaker 1: is something called the Human Brain Project. And and this
Speaker 1: is something that neuroscientist Henry Markham has been toiling away
Speaker 1: at for years and we've talked about it before, to
Speaker 1: this idea that you could reverse engineer of the human brain.
Speaker 1: And this is a very ambitious project to complete a
Speaker 1: or to build a complete model of a human brain.
Speaker 1: And we're talking from snapsis to hemispheres and then simulate
Speaker 1: it on a supercomputer. That is incredibly complex and ambitious.
Speaker 1: So what do you do, Well, you have to start
Speaker 1: with the basics and the basics in this case is
Speaker 1: the neo cortex of a rat, and Markham has simulated
Speaker 1: the behavior of a millionaire on portion of this rat
Speaker 1: neo cortex and this has given Markham a lot of
Speaker 1: new insight into everything from the expression of individual rat
Speaker 1: genes to the organizing principles of rat brains. And the
Speaker 1: team Market Seeing has published some of that data impair
Speaker 1: reviewed journals. But they're also beginning to integrate it into
Speaker 1: this cohesive model so that they can simulate it onto
Speaker 1: an IBM blue gene supercomputer, which will all then um
Speaker 1: lead to this human brain project. Now, if this human
Speaker 1: brain project is successful, we're talking about building a plug
Speaker 1: and play brain. Um, you could take it apart to
Speaker 1: figure out what the causes of brain disease are. You
Speaker 1: could rig it to robotics and develop a whole new
Speaker 1: range of intelligent technologies. You could strap on a pair
Speaker 1: of virtual reality classes and experience a brain other than
Speaker 1: your own. Now, the big question here, a lot of
Speaker 1: naysayers say, can you can this model scale, can you
Speaker 1: go from a rat brain to a human brain? And
Speaker 1: can this be done to that sort of complex um
Speaker 1: level of detail. We don't know yet, But if it's successful.
Speaker 1: The reason it is is because it began with rats.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, on that note, we're going to take
Speaker 1: a break, and when we come back, canna get into
Speaker 1: how rats are essentially just like us. All Right, we're back. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, we've been discussing the way we use rats
Speaker 1: in experiments in the past, how they're going to factor
Speaker 1: into our further explorations of the human mind and the
Speaker 1: human body in the future. And in doing this, it's
Speaker 1: it's already pretty obvious that you can't just look at
Speaker 1: this rat as a as a mere furry earthworm that
Speaker 1: we can just you just inject things into and see
Speaker 1: how it plays out in sort of a generic organism.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of there seems to be a lot
Speaker 1: more of a linkage between what it is to be
Speaker 1: a rat and what it is to be a human.
Speaker 1: That's right, And so that introduces us to these human
Speaker 1: like things that we like to define ourselves by. I'm
Speaker 1: talking about this idea that we could exhibit regret, or empathy,
Speaker 1: or even meta cognition, this idea that we could think
Speaker 1: about thinking that seems like something that only primates can do, right,
Speaker 1: But in fact, there are studies that will point you
Speaker 1: into the direction of rats being able to exhibit this
Speaker 1: as well. Indeed, for instance, rats being able to feel regret.
Speaker 1: This one is really fascinating. This one is from a
Speaker 1: study that came out in two thousand fourteen published in
Speaker 1: the journal Nature Neuroscience from It's a University of Minnesota
Speaker 1: study from Adam P. Steiner and A. David reddish Um.
Speaker 1: The key findings here are that rats who made a
Speaker 1: bad choice registered regret in the same part of the
Speaker 1: brain that humans are believed to show regret, the orbitofrontal cortex.
Speaker 1: And they also seem to look back on past regrets
Speaker 1: in the same way that humans do um. In other words,
Speaker 1: the rat is thinking about what it should have done now.
Speaker 1: The study itself has a lot to to to line
Speaker 1: up with human dyning UH do. Like, have you ever
Speaker 1: found yourself in a situation where there's a restaurant you
Speaker 1: really want to dine at, You go air it's too crowded.
Speaker 1: I have and then what what do you do? I
Speaker 1: go to another one sort of grudgingly, yes, exactly, And
Speaker 1: so this is kind of what they were setting out
Speaker 1: to do with the with the rats too. In the
Speaker 1: rats UH study, this model of of having to fall
Speaker 1: back on a plan, be adjusting your your your plans,
Speaker 1: and then how you think about past and future choices.
Speaker 1: The rats in this study were given the chance to
Speaker 1: feed on four flavors and four different feeding stations. Banana
Speaker 1: always a jazzy choice, cherry also good chocolate everyone loves it,
Speaker 1: and unflavored, which leaves a lot to be desired. Now,
Speaker 1: each rat is going to have its own in this experiment,
Speaker 1: had its own preferences on and its own patients level
Speaker 1: regarding how long they're gonna wait for something they want
Speaker 1: to eat, you know, just like any of us as
Speaker 1: we go out to get that meal on say a
Speaker 1: Friday date night or what have you. Um So, when
Speaker 1: the rats arrived at a station, a tone would let
Speaker 1: them know how long they would have to wait for
Speaker 1: their grub. And that could be one second way, or
Speaker 1: it could be a forty five second way. And again,
Speaker 1: if you're only living up to three years, that forty
Speaker 1: five second way is maybe a little more substantial. The
Speaker 1: researchers found that the rats decided to stay or go
Speaker 1: based on that tone based on the perspective weight, the
Speaker 1: same way humans would with a crowded restaurant. You know,
Speaker 1: two hour Wait, screw that, I'm going to Denny's and
Speaker 1: there I'm gonna eat it fast and angry, and then
Speaker 1: I'm moving on. And it was the same with the rats,
Speaker 1: but much much like a human that goes to to
Speaker 1: Denny's over the latest fusion dining sensation, the rats who
Speaker 1: skipped out on quality um favorite show for something faster
Speaker 1: and then showed regret. Uh. And then researchers observed the
Speaker 1: brain activity of via a little invasive tinkering and indicated
Speaker 1: that the rats were engaged in what they called mental
Speaker 1: time travel. So they're imagining the alternate reality of eating
Speaker 1: in the restaurant that it skipped and the that ability,
Speaker 1: of course, is core to so much of the human experience,
Speaker 1: right the regretting the past, worrying over the future, the
Speaker 1: entire wheel of human suffering, because uh uh. As the
Speaker 1: rats quickly angerate their lackluster plan B meals, they were
Speaker 1: already plotting the next better meal, which I mean, this
Speaker 1: is a very human thing, right, Like how many times
Speaker 1: have you anger eaten at a place which you're like,
Speaker 1: I really didn't want to do this, yeah, or even
Speaker 1: if it's still good, you're kind of like all right,
Speaker 1: well this is good, but I really wanted to try
Speaker 1: that ramen, you know, yeah, I mean, and the regret
Speaker 1: is it feels like one of those really human things.
Speaker 1: So it's interesting to see it played out in this context. Now,
Speaker 1: another thing that UM has been a bit of a
Speaker 1: surprise here in the last five years is this idea
Speaker 1: that rats can exhibit empathy. And so the next study
Speaker 1: that we're going to talk about UM covers empathy, but
Speaker 1: it also covers chocolate. As you mentioned before, Like this
Speaker 1: turns out to be one of rats favorite snacks, and
Speaker 1: like this is a very important thing in the world
Speaker 1: of rats if you have access to chocolate. And this
Speaker 1: will come into play in a moment. So two thousand eleven, Neurosciences,
Speaker 1: Peggy Mason, she devised an experiment where two rat mates
Speaker 1: were housed together for a few weeks, and then she
Speaker 1: placed one into a transparent tube that could only be
Speaker 1: opened from the outside. Now, the other rat, the free rat,
Speaker 1: was pretty curious. It was kind of sniffing around, and
Speaker 1: perhaps it was even a little bit frightened because it
Speaker 1: didn't immediately open the door. There's this idea that it
Speaker 1: could be experiencing something called emotional contagion. This this sort
Speaker 1: of fear that um in a group situation where you
Speaker 1: feel that other person's fear and is very uncomfortable. Right,
Speaker 1: So it's possible that that rat was kind of shying
Speaker 1: away at first, but once it kind of got this idea, oh,
Speaker 1: my friend just trapped in here, or my cage mates
Speaker 1: trapped in here, over and over again they would see
Speaker 1: that this rat would release the other rat that was
Speaker 1: trapped in the container. Now, the researchers had variations on
Speaker 1: this experiment. In one case, they put a fake rat
Speaker 1: in the container, which kind of like, come on, guys,
Speaker 1: you know rats are pretty smart. They're going to realize
Speaker 1: that that's a fake rat. And of course they did
Speaker 1: not try to release the fake rat. And then they
Speaker 1: had another version in which they presented a rat holding
Speaker 1: container um with a ratit and another one another rat
Speaker 1: holding container which contained chocolate. So this is where the
Speaker 1: willpower comes in, because again, here's this thing in front
Speaker 1: of you. This chocolate is the your most prized possession
Speaker 1: of your tiny rat life if you can access this.
Speaker 1: And what they found is that the rodents, the free ones,
Speaker 1: would actually go and free the cage mate and then
Speaker 1: they would go and get the chocolate, and not only
Speaker 1: would they get the chocolate second as this altruistic act,
Speaker 1: but they would share it with the cage mate. There's
Speaker 1: there's many a human that would not do that. I
Speaker 1: feel exactly right, and so this is very pro social behavior.
Speaker 1: And there was a follow ups study in two thousand
Speaker 1: and fourteen and the idea was, well, what happens if
Speaker 1: you put uh like rats in with other rats, so
Speaker 1: like meaning all albino, And then you do a sort
Speaker 1: of variation on that and you take say a black
Speaker 1: hooded rat with albino rat. Would they free each other
Speaker 1: even though they're of different strains. What they found is
Speaker 1: that when they had albino rats that were complete strangers,
Speaker 1: and the free albino rat came across the stranger albino
Speaker 1: rat that was in the container, it would free it. Okay,
Speaker 1: if they put this is the short and dirty of this. Okay,
Speaker 1: if they put the black hooded rat in a container
Speaker 1: and they were both strangers, the albino rat would not
Speaker 1: free it. However, if later on the albino rat was
Speaker 1: housed with the black hooded rat, it would free it.
Speaker 1: So it had to have some sort of relationship or
Speaker 1: environmental contact with it. And then they found out too
Speaker 1: that once the albino rat had the experience with a
Speaker 1: different strain i e. The black hooded rat, that it
Speaker 1: would then release other strangers who happened to be black
Speaker 1: hooded rats. And the implications of that are really interesting
Speaker 1: because you see that play out in society. Right, we
Speaker 1: see a stranger, we're not so certain about that person,
Speaker 1: we're not so trusting. We don't know if we want
Speaker 1: to help that person because they are apart from us, right,
Speaker 1: But once you experienced that person as another, as part
Speaker 1: of your circle, or you relate with that to that person,
Speaker 1: then you want to help that person. Right. Yeah. It's
Speaker 1: like straight up enemy mind with Dennis Quaid and Lewis
Speaker 1: Gossip Jr. It's the human and the alien and they
Speaker 1: hate each other in the crash land on the same planet.
Speaker 1: But then they learn, uh that they get to know
Speaker 1: each other, they have respect for each other, and suddenly
Speaker 1: they're looking after each other against a greater enemy. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And so what I think is interesting about that is
Speaker 1: that it kind of proves that this idea that the
Speaker 1: more diversity that have aren't exposed to well, the more
Speaker 1: empathy that you can exhibit, and the more connection that
Speaker 1: you have with your fellow rats or your fellow humans,
Speaker 1: and moreover, According to Benamy Bartel, who is one of
Speaker 1: the researchers on the two thousand and fourteen project, he said, quote,
Speaker 1: we share the same neural structure with rats that we
Speaker 1: use for our own epathetic responses. Our brain structures are
Speaker 1: responding in the same way. They are shaped in the
Speaker 1: same way when it comes to those sort of responses
Speaker 1: that require us to be empathetic. Now, at this point
Speaker 1: you might be saying, all right, well, that's that's all
Speaker 1: well and good. They can display some level of of empathy.
Speaker 1: But what about what about higher thought? What about higher
Speaker 1: levels of human thoughts such as um meta cognition. Uh,
Speaker 1: we're talking the ability to reflect on one's own mental processes.
Speaker 1: And this is this key stuff to human experience. Right,
Speaker 1: this is enough that makes or can make us rational animals.
Speaker 1: It's it's about realizing, oh, I I don't have enough
Speaker 1: in my head to call this problem. I need to
Speaker 1: do some homework. Or in loftier scenarios, it's the straight
Speaker 1: up sort of meditative that car tot a kind of
Speaker 1: a situation where you're stepping outside of your own thoughts
Speaker 1: and looking at them. Well, four rats, we see this
Speaker 1: as well. At two thousand seven, studied by researchers at
Speaker 1: the University of Georgia, the researchers trained rats to press
Speaker 1: a lever when they heard a short burst of static,
Speaker 1: and another one when they heard a long burst of static.
Speaker 1: Push the correct one, rat, and you will get a
Speaker 1: food pellet. Push the wrong one and you get nothing. Uh.
Speaker 1: It's it's what we call a duration discrimination test. And
Speaker 1: there's an additional catch here. If the rats decline the
Speaker 1: test completely, they receive a smaller reward anyway, like a
Speaker 1: half pellet. I can think of it as a consolation prize,
Speaker 1: you know. It's like a big moment on the game
Speaker 1: show where you can you can go for the big
Speaker 1: prize behind door number three, or just take home the
Speaker 1: washing machine that you already won. Now that probably sounds
Speaker 1: all pretty straightforward, right, But then the researchers start tinkering
Speaker 1: with the links of the static bird, making it harder
Speaker 1: for the rats to aceh the test and reap the rewards.
Speaker 1: So the core findings here when when the rats were
Speaker 1: uncertain about what they knew about the test and its parameters.
Speaker 1: They find themselves unsure how long has that burst? In
Speaker 1: which level am I supposed to to pull? They just
Speaker 1: cut their losses. They go with the smaller reward. In
Speaker 1: other words, they admit that they don't know, they're thinking
Speaker 1: about thinking um and that there they realize their understanding
Speaker 1: of the situation is it's strong enough and it's better
Speaker 1: not to play and take that consolation prize. You know
Speaker 1: what I like about this is that it's first of
Speaker 1: all the fact that those medium tones which were ambiguous,
Speaker 1: you know, like it's easy to get those short and
Speaker 1: long ones right for humans, but those ambiguous ones are
Speaker 1: hard for us as well. I mean, it's not just rats.
Speaker 1: And I like that they that they are admitting to
Speaker 1: a certain degree like I'm not quite sure what my
Speaker 1: path is. But also there's this kind of like Vegas
Speaker 1: odds thing at work here, Like I feel like there's
Speaker 1: going to be a round to to the Vegas version.
Speaker 1: But the next movie, the sequel, goes to Vegas. It
Speaker 1: would be good stuff. Now have you ever seen a
Speaker 1: magazine called US? I think it's called US. Yes, I've
Speaker 1: seen it in UM in grocery stores. Yeah, it's kind
Speaker 1: of like the uh like that. I don't want to
Speaker 1: say the downtrodden version of people, but maybe like the
Speaker 1: less glossy in journalistically competent version is this one that
Speaker 1: they put the screens over sometimes in grocery stores because
Speaker 1: the headlines are too sexy. I don't think there are
Speaker 1: two sexy. They're just really like very celebrity driven to
Speaker 1: a certain degree that's completely ridiculous. In fact, they have
Speaker 1: a section and I've seen this in my doctor's office,
Speaker 1: and the section is celebrities just like us. It'll show
Speaker 1: like Britney Spears getting you know, some Starbucks coffee or
Speaker 1: something like that, and it's so ridiculously funny. And because
Speaker 1: it's you know, yes, they're human, that's actually probably a
Speaker 1: good message for um, for your checkoutline reading or waiting
Speaker 1: room reading, because at least in the the checkoutline you
Speaker 1: do see those horrible headlines where it's where they're just
Speaker 1: treating these celebrities like like animals on display, and it's
Speaker 1: good to remember their human on some level. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: that's a lovely way to put it, that like animals
Speaker 1: on display. And so you kind of half expect when
Speaker 1: you're going through one of these things, and you start
Speaker 1: thinking about rats to see this in the same light,
Speaker 1: like rats they're just like us. They laugh And I'm
Speaker 1: sure you guys out there have heard about this before,
Speaker 1: but rats do laugh and they can be tickled. Um.
Speaker 1: This was found out in the nineties by neuroscientists Shack
Speaker 1: Bounds pans kept p A. N. K. Svpp and his
Speaker 1: colleagues that begin to eavesdrop on frolicking rats, and they
Speaker 1: found out that when they were playing, or they were
Speaker 1: just about to play, they were anticipating, they emitted this
Speaker 1: unique fifty killer hurts chip chirp. And it was only
Speaker 1: during that time they figured out this chirp was kind
Speaker 1: of like a laugh. And so one thing led to another,
Speaker 1: as they do, and they found themselves in the lab
Speaker 1: tickling rodents and what they call somato sensory stimulation. And
Speaker 1: in fact, when they did this, they found that rats
Speaker 1: emitted more laughter when being tickled by people than during
Speaker 1: any other activity. Now, I have to say it that
Speaker 1: aspect of this kind of chills me because have you
Speaker 1: ever been tickled against your will? It's terrible. It is
Speaker 1: you you feel like it's it's like being assaulted in
Speaker 1: a funny way. Yeah. Yeah, it's like you're like stop
Speaker 1: and you're laughing, and it just feels like this grotesque moment.
Speaker 1: You can't stop laughing, and yet you don't want to
Speaker 1: be tickled, and so the signals aren't matching up. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Like it's interesting to watch my son react to it,
Speaker 1: because he'll, you know, if you tickle him. It's like
Speaker 1: it's very much like he's laughing uncontrollably. He's under attack.
Speaker 1: He's like stop, stop, stop, and then you stop and
Speaker 1: he says, do it again, right right, So pan's kept
Speaker 1: in their colleagues, they described their tickling method fustly, so
Speaker 1: keep that in mind. These these rats that are like
Speaker 1: tickle me, don't tickle me, tickle me to don't take me,
Speaker 1: they say. Quote. The tickling was done with the right
Speaker 1: hand and consisted of rapid initial finger movements across the
Speaker 1: back with a focus on the neck, followed by rapidly
Speaker 1: turning the animals over on their backs with vigorous tickling
Speaker 1: of the ventral surface, followed by release after a few
Speaker 1: seconds of stimulation. This was repeated throughout each tickling session.
Speaker 1: Even though the tickling was brisk and assertive, care was
Speaker 1: taken not to frighten the animals. So yeah, I love
Speaker 1: that language in describing the tickling of a rat, and
Speaker 1: it sort of the nice, sort of detached clinical language
Speaker 1: of the scientific study it is. But I would love
Speaker 1: to see another study of the research assistance tickling to
Speaker 1: see how it affected them, you know, did it? And
Speaker 1: then maybe a follow up study with komodo dragons. Just
Speaker 1: just proof, just to lose some toasts, just to lose
Speaker 1: some So here are a couple other findings from the study.
Speaker 1: Rats housed by themselves sought out tickling by humans more
Speaker 1: than rats that shared their cages with other rats, which
Speaker 1: was interesting, right. This is their way of maybe compensating
Speaker 1: for a lack of social interaction. Rats who enjoyed the
Speaker 1: tickling initiated play with the researchers, emitting more laughter and
Speaker 1: play biding the hand when these are some of the
Speaker 1: same features that you see with rat on rat play.
Speaker 1: And rats that didn't like to be tickled tended to
Speaker 1: be anxious and neurotic, while laughter prone rats were friendlier
Speaker 1: and handled stress better. And this is really the crux
Speaker 1: of this study, because it's not just about hey, let's
Speaker 1: tickle some rats. It's more like, let's see how they're
Speaker 1: using this very pro social behavior, laughter and tickling to
Speaker 1: modulate the stresses of their life. And then let's look
Speaker 1: at rodents who are tickle adverse, because there are some,
Speaker 1: and try to bump this up against human mood disorders
Speaker 1: and figure out what's going on. And lo and behold,
Speaker 1: they found out this is really interesting, something called neurogenesis,
Speaker 1: which is new nerve cell growth in the hippocampus. They
Speaker 1: found that those cats, those cats, those rats that were
Speaker 1: tickle adverse will they when they were tickled, didn't have
Speaker 1: any surge in new uh nerve cell growth in the neurogenesis,
Speaker 1: and those rats that did like to be tickled well,
Speaker 1: had a ton of neurogenesis. And I thought that was
Speaker 1: particularly poignant because if you you know, of course I'm
Speaker 1: projecting here, but if you look at depression or mood
Speaker 1: disorders and humans, you can see that when um, a
Speaker 1: person is racked with anxiety or depression, it really is
Speaker 1: paralyzing to the person. And then in this way you
Speaker 1: see the same sort of thing playing out in the
Speaker 1: neural substrate of a rat. So they you have it,
Speaker 1: the laughing rat science of the laughing rat. Uh Julie
Speaker 1: if you ever, I don't know, fallen in love with
Speaker 1: the statue, and then your love for that statue made
Speaker 1: that statue come alive into a living flesh being, well
Speaker 1: not exactly a statue, but like a golemn. And it
Speaker 1: was just once okay, al right, we get that's acceptable.
Speaker 1: You know, we in our youth, we all have to
Speaker 1: experiment with the unliving made flesh, and the golm was
Speaker 1: going to come to life anyway. I just just hurrying
Speaker 1: along the process. Yeah, it's true. I mean, it's one
Speaker 1: of those cases where the Dear John letter that you
Speaker 1: write is actually on the golemn's forehead as you change
Speaker 1: the the uh the signal um. We're of course talking
Speaker 1: about alluding to the Roman poet Ovid's Pigmalion tale. Right,
Speaker 1: sculptor falls in love with the statue that he's created
Speaker 1: and it comes to life. What does that have to
Speaker 1: do with rats? Well, comes down to something that we
Speaker 1: call the Pigmalion effect. Yeah, And in nineteen sixty three
Speaker 1: there was a cologists, or there is a psychologist who
Speaker 1: began to really look at this unconscious experiment or bias
Speaker 1: as he called it. Then and Robert Rosenthal have been
Speaker 1: really working with humans on this because he had this
Speaker 1: hunch right that the experimenters were affecting the subjects that
Speaker 1: they were studying, and so he wanted to look a
Speaker 1: little bit further into this idea that you could unconsciously
Speaker 1: affect the outcome of someone's performance. Um and now, by
Speaker 1: the way, this is also called the expectancy effect and
Speaker 1: the Rosenthal effect. And in order for him to really
Speaker 1: build up his research, he turned to rats initially, and
Speaker 1: in one of his early experiments he tested the effects
Speaker 1: of the experimental expectancy on maze running performance. And he
Speaker 1: had two groups of research students test rats wrongly informing
Speaker 1: them either that the rats were specially bred to be
Speaker 1: quote maze dull or quote maze bright maze runners like
Speaker 1: in the young adult series and subsequent movies. Indeed, so
Speaker 1: they were either Dollard's or quite clever, right, And this
Speaker 1: is the idea that these research students had when they
Speaker 1: were handling the rats. So in reality, of course, all
Speaker 1: the rats were standard lab rats and they were randomly
Speaker 1: assigned to the Dull group or the Bright group, and
Speaker 1: the results show that the rats labeled as bright learned
Speaker 1: the mazes more quickly than those labeled as dull. And
Speaker 1: apparently the students had unconsciously influenced the performance of their
Speaker 1: rats depending on what they had been told. So these
Speaker 1: unconscious clues would play out in the way that they
Speaker 1: handled the rats, so nurturing and careful for those clever
Speaker 1: hans rats, right, or dismissive and more sort of brusque
Speaker 1: movements with them with the ones that were considered dull.
Speaker 1: And that was sort of like this earth shattering UH
Speaker 1: idea that unconsciously you could be saying things or you
Speaker 1: could have physical cues that would affect the person's performance. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean we're getting into the power of stigma here,
Speaker 1: the and the and the power of privilege and uh,
Speaker 1: and there are of course obvious human ratifications here and
Speaker 1: UH and Rosenthal was was was was definitely interested in those.
Speaker 1: UH followed up with the Nive experiment in which children
Speaker 1: were identified as growth s Burgers in school. The Grossburgers
Speaker 1: not meaning that they're gonna grow from its league tall,
Speaker 1: but rather they were expected to make academic strides. And
Speaker 1: the thing is that they did, They followed their performance
Speaker 1: and they showed. Yeah, the kids that were identified as
Speaker 1: growth s Burgers, UH, definitely improved academically. But it comes
Speaker 1: down to the same situation as the rats. They were
Speaker 1: just selected at random. There was no weeding out of
Speaker 1: who had you know what, what necessary criteria to succeed.
Speaker 1: So UM, the idea here is that UM is that
Speaker 1: you know they're they're in the classroom. They're labeled as
Speaker 1: as special as growth spurgers, and so that affects, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, the teacher student interaction, and it also affects
Speaker 1: the students expectations of self. It gets into communication, warmth
Speaker 1: of communication, the depth of the teaching, better feedback resources, uh, etcetera.
Speaker 1: All because they went into it expecting thinking that this
Speaker 1: particular child is going to achieve more than the one
Speaker 1: next to it. Yeah, and that's huge, right because everyone
Speaker 1: comes into the classroom with biases. There's no way to
Speaker 1: get around it. But if you're aware of it, then
Speaker 1: perhaps you can change your behavior and those kids can
Speaker 1: get a fair shake. Carol Dweck, who we've mentioned before,
Speaker 1: she's a psychologist and researcher at Stanford. She said, quote,
Speaker 1: you may be standing farther away from someone you have
Speaker 1: or expectations for. You may not be making as much
Speaker 1: eye contact, and it's not something you can put your
Speaker 1: finger on. We are not usually aware of how we
Speaker 1: are conveying our expectations to other people, but it's there,
Speaker 1: all right. So at this point in the podcast, we
Speaker 1: find ourselves in kind of a post secretive nim viewing
Speaker 1: situation where, uh, you know, obviously these uh, these these
Speaker 1: lab rats and mice have contributed so much and will
Speaker 1: continue to contribute to our medical research or understanding of
Speaker 1: of what it is to be human and how we work.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, we see, we see all
Speaker 1: of this this science um backing up the idea that
Speaker 1: they're they're more than just rats. They're a little more
Speaker 1: like us than perhaps we're ready for. And yet, according
Speaker 1: to an amendment made to the Animal Welfare Act in
Speaker 1: two thousand and four, rats including mice of the genus Mews,
Speaker 1: bread for research and labs and birds are not considered animals.
Speaker 1: And this is a kind of semantic distancing. It's a
Speaker 1: way for government agencies in the United States to get
Speaker 1: around issues concerning personhood, paining, and empathy when using these animals,
Speaker 1: particularly in these highly invasive experiments. Not just maze running here, yeah,
Speaker 1: like actually like putting wires into the brain and and
Speaker 1: and Endwarf's things. Yeah, and in actual studies on pain. Right. Um,
Speaker 1: so it's just interesting that this this is an animal
Speaker 1: that is not concerned animal and yet um, you know,
Speaker 1: recent research is really beginning to show us to what
Speaker 1: degree in particular empathy is available to this species and
Speaker 1: not just this species but other species. Yeah. I mean
Speaker 1: to think that this animal in this cage, in this
Speaker 1: lab is technically lab equipment really from from from a
Speaker 1: legal standpoint, um, but to your point, yeah, we end
Speaker 1: up seeing the rat as more than mere vermin, more
Speaker 1: than mere disease vectors, and handy by logical test subjects. Um,
Speaker 1: what changes we find ourselves dealing with this? This new
Speaker 1: branch of ethology ethology is the science of animal behavior. Uh.
Speaker 1: This new branch is called cognitive ethology, and it's concerned
Speaker 1: with the influence of conscious awareness and intention on the
Speaker 1: behavior of an animal. So a lot of the research
Speaker 1: stems from the work of zoologists Donald Griffin. But uh,
Speaker 1: but you see it's spreading out. Really if you pay
Speaker 1: attention to science headlines coming down the coming down the pike. Uh,
Speaker 1: we regularly see research uh, not just mice, but a
Speaker 1: variety of animals where we're we're really stopping and saying,
Speaker 1: what is human consciousness? What are the sort of the
Speaker 1: parameters we can pick out off on that outside of
Speaker 1: our our blind brain bias and uh and and what
Speaker 1: can we identify these other creatures? Because while you know,
Speaker 1: we have plenty of informal accounts of rat consciousness that
Speaker 1: have been around for a while doing no small part
Speaker 1: to pet owners and animal lovers and and perhaps no
Speaker 1: all part due to projection, uh, you know, projecting on them,
Speaker 1: kind of having a Pygmalion effect with the animal to
Speaker 1: make it more human and more live. But the thing
Speaker 1: is now we're seeing neuroscientific backup for so many of
Speaker 1: those feelings. Uh and again not just with rats, but
Speaker 1: with a wild wide variety of animals. Yeah. I was
Speaker 1: just thinking about our episode that we did on elephant empathy,
Speaker 1: and here's a case where it's really apparent and there's
Speaker 1: a whole lot of projecting, right, because this is this
Speaker 1: gentle giant that we all know and love, and it's
Speaker 1: got that trunk, and the trunk is very expressive and
Speaker 1: as we have learned from Dr France to Wall who's
Speaker 1: a biologists primatologists, um, elephants are are very perceptive, and
Speaker 1: they get distressed when they see others in distress, and
Speaker 1: they reach out to calm each other down. And it's
Speaker 1: a not too dissimilar to a way that chimpanzees or
Speaker 1: humans embrace one another. And we see that played out
Speaker 1: in the animal mole world over and over again. So
Speaker 1: we've reached this understanding of empathy and other animals, and
Speaker 1: yet there still seems to be this dividing line, this
Speaker 1: kind of human exceptionalism. Yeah, I mean, I mean the
Speaker 1: basic question are humans exceptional? Are we something other than animals?
Speaker 1: Are we some sort of highly evolved ascendant species above
Speaker 1: everything else, or are we just highly evolved rat essentially
Speaker 1: torturing our kin to advance our own scientific understanding of
Speaker 1: the world. Like in researching this episode, I kept thinking
Speaker 1: of of of this fortress of consciousness, you know this, uh,
Speaker 1: this this fortress that humans have built, and for the
Speaker 1: longest they are the only ones allowed to occupy the
Speaker 1: inner protection of that fortress. And then eventually we learned
Speaker 1: enough to say, all right, well, the great apes can
Speaker 1: come in. Okay, you you guys have have some level
Speaker 1: of of of consciousness and will admit that you can
Speaker 1: live in some part, and there's no dispute how similar
Speaker 1: we are. So I guess we gotta let you. I
Speaker 1: gotta let you in the sciences on the table. And
Speaker 1: yet we've discussed in previous episodes, we end up with
Speaker 1: with data that emerges on other animals that we have
Speaker 1: to at least some of us, have to let into
Speaker 1: the fortress, you know, from dolphins and elephants to even
Speaker 1: something like the the octopus, which is which has a
Speaker 1: very different brain than our mammalian brain. But when you
Speaker 1: start looking at it, when you start taking yourself outside
Speaker 1: of the human uh bias and put it put yourself
Speaker 1: in the octopus as much as possible, you have to
Speaker 1: start questioning is this animal conscious too? So that brings
Speaker 1: us back to rats. Are they truly empathetic? Are they
Speaker 1: truly conscious on some level? And then if they are,
Speaker 1: what happens to animal testing? How do you? What do
Speaker 1: we do? I mean, we've already seen the whole situation
Speaker 1: where with the legislation, we're almost preparing for that battle
Speaker 1: by going ahead and uh and devaluing them to mere
Speaker 1: lab equipment. Yeah. Well, some people would say too, when
Speaker 1: it comes to empathy and rats, that it's just a
Speaker 1: heightened form of the ootional contagion, right that these rats
Speaker 1: are they're just feeling so um distraught over another rats,
Speaker 1: distress that they're trying to make it stop. That it's
Speaker 1: not necessarily empathy from an altruistic point of view. But
Speaker 1: Peggy Mason, one of the lead researchers and there's rat
Speaker 1: empathy studies, will say it takes a lot for a
Speaker 1: rat to downgrade its own fear in that emotional contagion
Speaker 1: situation in order to actually go and free the other rat.
Speaker 1: So there's something more going on than just mirror emotional contagion.
Speaker 1: And I really like this quote because Peggy Mason, I
Speaker 1: think hit it right on the hat. She says she's
Speaker 1: more than happy to consider herself a rat with a
Speaker 1: fancy neo cortex. In other words, she there, there's the similarity,
Speaker 1: is there? We just kind of have this nice, beautiful
Speaker 1: neo cortex sitting atop our already rat nous. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: mean I think of it in terms of word processes.
Speaker 1: I end up writing a lot in Microsoft. Word has
Speaker 1: lots of bells and whistles, many of which I don't
Speaker 1: even use. It has all your spell check and what
Speaker 1: have you But then there's also just Microsoft Text, which
Speaker 1: is just pretty basic. But is it fair to say
Speaker 1: that word is a word processor and text is not
Speaker 1: a word processor when they both essentially do the same thing,
Speaker 1: except one is a little more complex than the other.
Speaker 1: Well in one, right, So it's empathy in both scripts,
Speaker 1: right one just one is just maybe we can talk
Speaker 1: about more, right, because we have the facility to in
Speaker 1: our own language. But who knows that rats aren't talking
Speaker 1: about empathy in their own language, which is I know,
Speaker 1: sort of crazy. But these are these are ideas circulating
Speaker 1: um And the idea here too is that empathy for
Speaker 1: humans allows us to momentarily occupy the mind space of another.
Speaker 1: And the idea of that is that when we can
Speaker 1: do this, we can help support one another. We can
Speaker 1: guess what's going on, we can make predictions. It is
Speaker 1: one of the cornerstones of a civilization. Cooperation and the
Speaker 1: ability to um you know, put some sort of pattern
Speaker 1: recognition into place. And to say that this is only
Speaker 1: available to primates is you know, looking to be more
Speaker 1: and more erroneous of a line of logic. But what
Speaker 1: happens when those um high thinking, self aware humans inevitably
Speaker 1: bite the dust, either due to their own mismanagement of
Speaker 1: their resources, their misuse of their weapons, or just some
Speaker 1: cosmic calamity that comes crashing down from the sky. What
Speaker 1: happens to the meager ratituli. What happens to the meager rat,
Speaker 1: Rats will take revenge. That's right. So when the sixth
Speaker 1: mass extinction occurs, rats may just be the Winner's here.
Speaker 1: We're not saying this is fact. This is largely a
Speaker 1: thought experiment thought up by John Zalo Swiss, a geologist
Speaker 1: at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom. He
Speaker 1: studies Earth history and his colleagues and he we're just
Speaker 1: kind of sitting around thinking, Hey, what if we're at
Speaker 1: the edge of a mass extinction, what animal would be
Speaker 1: most likely to survive and repopulate the Earth. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: he contends it's the rat, because we discussed their survivors.
Speaker 1: They are, they have all the skills they need to
Speaker 1: survive and thrive in new environments. They pretty much colonize
Speaker 1: the entire world and they stiffer stand toe to toe
Speaker 1: with humans on that on that particular accomplishment. Uh So,
Speaker 1: when the environment changes, when the world changes in a
Speaker 1: way that completely leaves humanity behind. These are gonna be
Speaker 1: the rats are gonna be one of those species that
Speaker 1: can that can actually thrive in this vastly new world.
Speaker 1: And of course there's gonna they're gonna be some additional
Speaker 1: mutations as well, that's right. Uh, they may be larger.
Speaker 1: That's the idea that Zalaswitz was talking about. Here is
Speaker 1: the time frame of this purported rat takeover would be
Speaker 1: about three million to ten million years from now end,
Speaker 1: based on previous rates of repopulation after mass extinctions, as
Speaker 1: thought that the rat would grow much larger in size
Speaker 1: um And again, you know, again this is a thought experiment,
Speaker 1: but it makes a lot of sense when you look
Speaker 1: at how wildly they are, and how they repopulate or
Speaker 1: reproduce so quickly, and how clever and social they are. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's it's not that difficult to imagine a
Speaker 1: future in which intelligent mutated rats are are running the
Speaker 1: streets and there are no humans around. Now, will they
Speaker 1: have mutated turtles in their midst as well? I don't know.
Speaker 1: I leave that for the scientists to decide. I think
Speaker 1: you're you are you excited about that notion? I am, because,
Speaker 1: because of course, in teenage Ninja turtles. You have splinter
Speaker 1: the intelligent rat, remember and uh, and of course that
Speaker 1: leads to turtles, and then from there it just gets
Speaker 1: It's it's crazy, but maybe that comic and TV shows
Speaker 1: actually add blimps into our future, which just reminds us
Speaker 1: all again that the little blip on the radar of
Speaker 1: time that we all are all right on that count. Hey.
Speaker 1: If you want to check out more episodes of this podcast,
Speaker 1: um more blog post videos linkside our social media accounts,
Speaker 1: you can do so by visiting stuff to Blow your
Speaker 1: Mind dot com. If you have thoughts about rats that
Speaker 1: you want to share with us, or any other animals really,
Speaker 1: particularly concerning empathy, please send us your thoughts at below
Speaker 1: the mind at how stuff works dot com. For more
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