February 26, 2015 • 45 mins
You may think rats are just vermin, but the fact is they own huge metropolitan cities like New York. And when it comes to science they've contributed an immense amount of data (although not voluntarily). Find out how similar rats are to humans and whether or not they're capable of empathy in this episode of the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
when was the last time you saw a live rat? Ha? Ha?
I saw a huge rat at the zoo once, Yeah,
(00:25):
in in an exhibit. No, just running across the path.
And that's not surprising, right, because the zoo has lots
and lots of food at any animals dispose. Also, I'm
sure that rats hang out there quite a bit. Okay,
a little similarly, I last time I saw a live
rat outside of the confines of a pet store was
when I was taking the public transportation around here, Martha.
(00:47):
The drain that is at times kind of a subway,
and indeed I get to see a nice fat subway
rat running around under the tracks, which for me is
always kind of a treat because it, you know, it
brings to mind more you know, opic ideals of the underworld. Um.
And at the same time it's also I can't help
but I think it's a little gross because obviously the
(01:08):
rat is there because there's plenty of garbage. Dat well,
there's something very outlaw and charming about these rats to
dwelling in a subterranean world, right, and we tend to
think of them more in really negative terms, thinking about
them as vectors of disease. But as we're going to
explore today, rats are one of the most successful species,
(01:30):
and rats they're just like us that we have a
lot in common with them. Indeed, now we don't want
to completely discredit the whole disease vector thing because according
to the CDC there that they're These are just some
of the key diseases transmitted by rodents. There's a hantavirus,
pulmonary syndrome, hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome, a loss of fever,
(01:53):
a leptospirosis, lymphocitic chronomeningitis, o hemorrhage, fee ever, plague, rat
bite fever, someone elis, someon elysis, and several South American
arena viruses. Well, you know this is how I feel
about being a rat. You probably want to have a
heavy reputation like that, right because you're out there on
(02:15):
the streets, the mean streets. You want to mean persona like, hey,
I might accidentally give you some sort of plague or
or not so accidentally so don't mess with me. And
when you start to think about rats in this way,
their survival instincts, you can really look at them as
more of it's just this sort of pestilence underground, but
(02:36):
more as the uh the largest collective holders of real
estate in major metropolitan areas, specifically Manhattan, because we should
really consider this rich life of the rat there, which
arrives sometimes in the eighteen hundreds. We're talking about Rattus norvegicus,
and it has made itself so ubiquitous that just it's
(02:59):
very presence is sort of one of those defining features
of New York City when you think about New York, right,
and they have successfully lived off the detritus of humans.
And you can follow droppings nearly anywhere if you want
to write, and you'll find a path between walls, nod
between bricks, and then just knowing that there's this whole
(03:23):
other species, is life thriving beneath our feet or between
our walls, and sometimes even coming up through our toilet bowl.
I think about that in the middle of the night sometimes,
and I have to admit, when I am in New York,
if I don't see a rat, I feel a little
let down like it's it's it should's part of the experience,
(03:44):
you know. So if there's not one appearing naturally, I
kind of want to hire somebody to just let a
rat trained one run across the street in front of me. UM. Now,
when you get into the exact numbers of rats in Manhattan,
I bring this up because it was recently in the news. UM.
Past estimates of range from an extreme infestation of twenty
(04:04):
eight million rats to uh the other more conservative estimates
of eight point four million UM. But recently there's a
study that came out from Jonathan Arbach, a PhD candidate
at Columbia University, and he's crunched the numbers and he
thinks that it's less than that, probably more like two million.
But basically, any way you shake it, we're talking about
(04:27):
a lot of rats living in this great metropolis. Yeah,
that's a decent sized population. And it's really easy to
start actually going the rout a two year oute to
and projecting, um, your human qualities are our human qualities
onto them. UM. But as we will explore later on,
there really are a lot of parallels between routes and humans. UM.
(04:50):
But one of the things that's often overlooked is that
there's quite a bit of contribution from rats, albeit not voluntarily.
That's right. We're getting on the ratitui area and getting
into more of the secretive nim area here, right. Um.
As it turns out, of all lab animals are mice
and rats according to the Foundation for Biomedical Research, and
(05:14):
that is that is quite a lot. Because you think
of lab animals, right um. You know, you also tend
to throw in chimps and you think of experiments on
rabbits or what have you, but or even some things
like ecoli and some of the jazzery experiments that we've
discussed here in the past. But when you come back
down to it, it's the rodents that are carrying most
of the load. And why is this, Well, a lot
(05:36):
of it has to do with convenience, right. Rats are
small in size, they're easily housed, you can easily maintain
them in captivity, and they're fairly adaptive to new surroundings.
I mean, obviously there are plenty of species out there
that that you cannot keep in captivity. They just do
not survive. They just completely fail if you try to
house them. The rat, however, one of its skills as adaptations. Hey,
(06:00):
it adapts well to this captive lifestyle. Also, rats reproduce
like crazy, and they don't live more than two or
three years. So if you have a study and you
need to look at several generations all the creature to see, uh,
see how your studies panning out, you can do that
in a short period of human time. You know. Now,
they're they're no ecoli. Heck, the E. Coli long term
(06:22):
evolution experiment that we've discussed here before has seen more
than fifty thou generations passed in just twenty five years.
But rats and mice boast other key advantages. They're also
cheap to acquire. You can buy lab mice and rats
in bulk from commercial suppliers, so there's no hanging around
around looking like a creepy person at the local pet store,
(06:42):
you know, with your burlap sack. And then when it
comes to actually handling them, uh, this is a pretty
uh mild tempered creature. You can reach into the cage,
you can get them out, you can you can handle them.
You don't need a you know, an electric prod to
deal with the lab rat. Right, They're highly portable and
their genetic biological and behavior characteristics closely resemble those of humans,
(07:06):
making them really ideal to study. So, as you mentioned,
because they reproduce so quickly, you can tinker around with genetics,
and within just a couple of generations you can you
can begin to take some sort of hypothesis and then
put it into study by tinkering with the genetics and
seeing what the outcome is, which of course informs what
(07:27):
we're trying to do medically with humans. And when I
say informing, I mean really the contributions to a ton
of diseases and conditions that we have been studying through wraps.
And what exactly have they helped with? Well, according to
Life Sciences article wy do medical researchers use mice, they've
assisted with the following uh standing in as human models, hypertension, diabetes, cataracts, obesity, seizures,
(07:55):
respiratory problems, deafness, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, cancer, cystic fibrosis,
HIV and AIDS, heart disease, muscular drift dystrophy, and spinal
cord injuries. And in addition to all that, we regularly
turned to mice for varying studies that concern behavioral sensory, aging, nutrition,
(08:16):
and genetic studies, as well as the treatment of drug addictions. Yeah,
so that's quite a resume that that rats and mice have.
Now consider that rats were first used in the lab
at the turn of the century by researchers believe in
Chicago and at Clark University. So at first it was
just the humble rodent maze that they would run through
(08:37):
to try to give us some ideas about the more
behavioral aspects of rats. Now fast forward to today and
they're actually occupying a far loftier space and studies. And
one of the loftiest uh that I could think of
is something called the Human Brain Project. And and this
(09:01):
is something that neuroscientist Henry Markham has been toiling away
at for years and we've talked about it before, to
this idea that you could reverse engineer of the human brain.
And this is a very ambitious project to complete a
or to build a complete model of a human brain.
And we're talking from snapsis to hemispheres and then simulate
(09:23):
it on a supercomputer. That is incredibly complex and ambitious.
So what do you do, Well, you have to start
with the basics and the basics in this case is
the neo cortex of a rat, and Markham has simulated
the behavior of a millionaire on portion of this rat
neo cortex and this has given Markham a lot of
(09:45):
new insight into everything from the expression of individual rat
genes to the organizing principles of rat brains. And the
team Market Seeing has published some of that data impair
reviewed journals. But they're also beginning to integrate it into
this cohesive model so that they can simulate it onto
(10:06):
an IBM blue gene supercomputer, which will all then um
lead to this human brain project. Now, if this human
brain project is successful, we're talking about building a plug
and play brain. Um, you could take it apart to
figure out what the causes of brain disease are. You
could rig it to robotics and develop a whole new
(10:26):
range of intelligent technologies. You could strap on a pair
of virtual reality classes and experience a brain other than
your own. Now, the big question here, a lot of
naysayers say, can you can this model scale, can you
go from a rat brain to a human brain? And
can this be done to that sort of complex um
(10:49):
level of detail. We don't know yet, But if it's successful.
The reason it is is because it began with rats.
All right, Well, on that note, we're going to take
a break, and when we come back, canna get into
how rats are essentially just like us. All Right, we're back. Um.
(11:13):
You know, we've been discussing the way we use rats
in experiments in the past, how they're going to factor
into our further explorations of the human mind and the
human body in the future. And in doing this, it's
it's already pretty obvious that you can't just look at
this rat as a as a mere furry earthworm that
we can just you just inject things into and see
(11:34):
how it plays out in sort of a generic organism.
There's a lot of there seems to be a lot
more of a linkage between what it is to be
a rat and what it is to be a human.
That's right, And so that introduces us to these human
like things that we like to define ourselves by. I'm
talking about this idea that we could exhibit regret, or empathy,
(11:57):
or even meta cognition, this idea that we could think
about thinking that seems like something that only primates can do, right,
But in fact, there are studies that will point you
into the direction of rats being able to exhibit this
as well. Indeed, for instance, rats being able to feel regret.
This one is really fascinating. This one is from a
(12:18):
study that came out in two thousand fourteen published in
the journal Nature Neuroscience from It's a University of Minnesota
study from Adam P. Steiner and A. David reddish Um.
The key findings here are that rats who made a
bad choice registered regret in the same part of the
brain that humans are believed to show regret, the orbitofrontal cortex.
(12:39):
And they also seem to look back on past regrets
in the same way that humans do um. In other words,
the rat is thinking about what it should have done now.
The study itself has a lot to to to line
up with human dyning UH do. Like, have you ever
found yourself in a situation where there's a restaurant you
really want to dine at, You go air it's too crowded.
(13:02):
I have and then what what do you do? I
go to another one sort of grudgingly, yes, exactly, And
so this is kind of what they were setting out
to do with the with the rats too. In the
rats UH study, this model of of having to fall
back on a plan, be adjusting your your your plans,
and then how you think about past and future choices.
(13:22):
The rats in this study were given the chance to
feed on four flavors and four different feeding stations. Banana
always a jazzy choice, cherry also good chocolate everyone loves it,
and unflavored, which leaves a lot to be desired. Now,
each rat is going to have its own in this experiment,
had its own preferences on and its own patients level
regarding how long they're gonna wait for something they want
(13:44):
to eat, you know, just like any of us as
we go out to get that meal on say a
Friday date night or what have you. Um So, when
the rats arrived at a station, a tone would let
them know how long they would have to wait for
their grub. And that could be one second way, or
it could be a forty five second way. And again,
if you're only living up to three years, that forty
five second way is maybe a little more substantial. The
(14:07):
researchers found that the rats decided to stay or go
based on that tone based on the perspective weight, the
same way humans would with a crowded restaurant. You know,
two hour Wait, screw that, I'm going to Denny's and
there I'm gonna eat it fast and angry, and then
I'm moving on. And it was the same with the rats,
but much much like a human that goes to to
Denny's over the latest fusion dining sensation, the rats who
(14:28):
skipped out on quality um favorite show for something faster
and then showed regret. Uh. And then researchers observed the
brain activity of via a little invasive tinkering and indicated
that the rats were engaged in what they called mental
time travel. So they're imagining the alternate reality of eating
in the restaurant that it skipped and the that ability,
(14:50):
of course, is core to so much of the human experience,
right the regretting the past, worrying over the future, the
entire wheel of human suffering, because uh uh. As the
rats quickly angerate their lackluster plan B meals, they were
already plotting the next better meal, which I mean, this
is a very human thing, right, Like how many times
have you anger eaten at a place which you're like,
(15:13):
I really didn't want to do this, yeah, or even
if it's still good, you're kind of like all right,
well this is good, but I really wanted to try
that ramen, you know, yeah, I mean, and the regret
is it feels like one of those really human things.
So it's interesting to see it played out in this context. Now,
another thing that UM has been a bit of a
surprise here in the last five years is this idea
(15:35):
that rats can exhibit empathy. And so the next study
that we're going to talk about UM covers empathy, but
it also covers chocolate. As you mentioned before, Like this
turns out to be one of rats favorite snacks, and
like this is a very important thing in the world
of rats if you have access to chocolate. And this
will come into play in a moment. So two thousand eleven, Neurosciences,
(16:00):
Peggy Mason, she devised an experiment where two rat mates
were housed together for a few weeks, and then she
placed one into a transparent tube that could only be
opened from the outside. Now, the other rat, the free rat,
was pretty curious. It was kind of sniffing around, and
perhaps it was even a little bit frightened because it
(16:21):
didn't immediately open the door. There's this idea that it
could be experiencing something called emotional contagion. This this sort
of fear that um in a group situation where you
feel that other person's fear and is very uncomfortable. Right,
So it's possible that that rat was kind of shying
away at first, but once it kind of got this idea, oh,
(16:45):
my friend just trapped in here, or my cage mates
trapped in here, over and over again they would see
that this rat would release the other rat that was
trapped in the container. Now, the researchers had variations on
this experiment. In one case, they put a fake rat
in the container, which kind of like, come on, guys,
you know rats are pretty smart. They're going to realize
(17:07):
that that's a fake rat. And of course they did
not try to release the fake rat. And then they
had another version in which they presented a rat holding
container um with a ratit and another one another rat
holding container which contained chocolate. So this is where the
willpower comes in, because again, here's this thing in front
(17:27):
of you. This chocolate is the your most prized possession
of your tiny rat life if you can access this.
And what they found is that the rodents, the free ones,
would actually go and free the cage mate and then
they would go and get the chocolate, and not only
would they get the chocolate second as this altruistic act,
but they would share it with the cage mate. There's
(17:50):
there's many a human that would not do that. I
feel exactly right, and so this is very pro social behavior.
And there was a follow ups study in two thousand
and fourteen and the idea was, well, what happens if
you put uh like rats in with other rats, so
(18:10):
like meaning all albino, And then you do a sort
of variation on that and you take say a black
hooded rat with albino rat. Would they free each other
even though they're of different strains. What they found is
that when they had albino rats that were complete strangers,
and the free albino rat came across the stranger albino
(18:31):
rat that was in the container, it would free it. Okay,
if they put this is the short and dirty of this. Okay,
if they put the black hooded rat in a container
and they were both strangers, the albino rat would not
free it. However, if later on the albino rat was
housed with the black hooded rat, it would free it.
(18:55):
So it had to have some sort of relationship or
environmental contact with it. And then they found out too
that once the albino rat had the experience with a
different strain i e. The black hooded rat, that it
would then release other strangers who happened to be black
hooded rats. And the implications of that are really interesting
(19:17):
because you see that play out in society. Right, we
see a stranger, we're not so certain about that person,
we're not so trusting. We don't know if we want
to help that person because they are apart from us, right,
But once you experienced that person as another, as part
of your circle, or you relate with that to that person,
then you want to help that person. Right. Yeah. It's
(19:39):
like straight up enemy mind with Dennis Quaid and Lewis
Gossip Jr. It's the human and the alien and they
hate each other in the crash land on the same planet.
But then they learn, uh that they get to know
each other, they have respect for each other, and suddenly
they're looking after each other against a greater enemy. Yeah.
And so what I think is interesting about that is
that it kind of proves that this idea that the
(19:59):
more diversity that have aren't exposed to well, the more
empathy that you can exhibit, and the more connection that
you have with your fellow rats or your fellow humans,
and moreover, According to Benamy Bartel, who is one of
the researchers on the two thousand and fourteen project, he said, quote,
we share the same neural structure with rats that we
use for our own epathetic responses. Our brain structures are
(20:23):
responding in the same way. They are shaped in the
same way when it comes to those sort of responses
that require us to be empathetic. Now, at this point
you might be saying, all right, well, that's that's all
well and good. They can display some level of of empathy.
But what about what about higher thought? What about higher
levels of human thoughts such as um meta cognition. Uh,
(20:45):
we're talking the ability to reflect on one's own mental processes.
And this is this key stuff to human experience. Right,
this is enough that makes or can make us rational animals.
It's it's about realizing, oh, I I don't have enough
in my head to call this problem. I need to
do some homework. Or in loftier scenarios, it's the straight
(21:05):
up sort of meditative that car tot a kind of
a situation where you're stepping outside of your own thoughts
and looking at them. Well, four rats, we see this
as well. At two thousand seven, studied by researchers at
the University of Georgia, the researchers trained rats to press
a lever when they heard a short burst of static,
and another one when they heard a long burst of static.
(21:25):
Push the correct one, rat, and you will get a
food pellet. Push the wrong one and you get nothing. Uh.
It's it's what we call a duration discrimination test. And
there's an additional catch here. If the rats decline the
test completely, they receive a smaller reward anyway, like a
half pellet. I can think of it as a consolation prize,
you know. It's like a big moment on the game
(21:47):
show where you can you can go for the big
prize behind door number three, or just take home the
washing machine that you already won. Now that probably sounds
all pretty straightforward, right, But then the researchers start tinkering
with the links of the static bird, making it harder
for the rats to aceh the test and reap the rewards.
So the core findings here when when the rats were
uncertain about what they knew about the test and its parameters.
(22:11):
They find themselves unsure how long has that burst? In
which level am I supposed to to pull? They just
cut their losses. They go with the smaller reward. In
other words, they admit that they don't know, they're thinking
about thinking um and that there they realize their understanding
of the situation is it's strong enough and it's better
not to play and take that consolation prize. You know
(22:33):
what I like about this is that it's first of
all the fact that those medium tones which were ambiguous,
you know, like it's easy to get those short and
long ones right for humans, but those ambiguous ones are
hard for us as well. I mean, it's not just rats.
And I like that they that they are admitting to
a certain degree like I'm not quite sure what my
(22:54):
path is. But also there's this kind of like Vegas
odds thing at work here, Like I feel like there's
going to be a round to to the Vegas version.
But the next movie, the sequel, goes to Vegas. It
would be good stuff. Now have you ever seen a
magazine called US? I think it's called US. Yes, I've
seen it in UM in grocery stores. Yeah, it's kind
(23:18):
of like the uh like that. I don't want to
say the downtrodden version of people, but maybe like the
less glossy in journalistically competent version is this one that
they put the screens over sometimes in grocery stores because
the headlines are too sexy. I don't think there are
two sexy. They're just really like very celebrity driven to
(23:38):
a certain degree that's completely ridiculous. In fact, they have
a section and I've seen this in my doctor's office,
and the section is celebrities just like us. It'll show
like Britney Spears getting you know, some Starbucks coffee or
something like that, and it's so ridiculously funny. And because
it's you know, yes, they're human, that's actually probably a
(23:58):
good message for um, for your checkoutline reading or waiting
room reading, because at least in the the checkoutline you
do see those horrible headlines where it's where they're just
treating these celebrities like like animals on display, and it's
good to remember their human on some level. Yeah, And
that's a lovely way to put it, that like animals
on display. And so you kind of half expect when
(24:20):
you're going through one of these things, and you start
thinking about rats to see this in the same light,
like rats they're just like us. They laugh And I'm
sure you guys out there have heard about this before,
but rats do laugh and they can be tickled. Um.
This was found out in the nineties by neuroscientists Shack
Bounds pans kept p A. N. K. Svpp and his
(24:40):
colleagues that begin to eavesdrop on frolicking rats, and they
found out that when they were playing, or they were
just about to play, they were anticipating, they emitted this
unique fifty killer hurts chip chirp. And it was only
during that time they figured out this chirp was kind
of like a laugh. And so one thing led to another,
(25:04):
as they do, and they found themselves in the lab
tickling rodents and what they call somato sensory stimulation. And
in fact, when they did this, they found that rats
emitted more laughter when being tickled by people than during
any other activity. Now, I have to say it that
(25:25):
aspect of this kind of chills me because have you
ever been tickled against your will? It's terrible. It is
you you feel like it's it's like being assaulted in
a funny way. Yeah. Yeah, it's like you're like stop
and you're laughing, and it just feels like this grotesque moment.
You can't stop laughing, and yet you don't want to
(25:46):
be tickled, and so the signals aren't matching up. Yeah.
Like it's interesting to watch my son react to it,
because he'll, you know, if you tickle him. It's like
it's very much like he's laughing uncontrollably. He's under attack.
He's like stop, stop, stop, and then you stop and
he says, do it again, right right, So pan's kept
in their colleagues, they described their tickling method fustly, so
(26:07):
keep that in mind. These these rats that are like
tickle me, don't tickle me, tickle me to don't take me,
they say. Quote. The tickling was done with the right
hand and consisted of rapid initial finger movements across the
back with a focus on the neck, followed by rapidly
turning the animals over on their backs with vigorous tickling
of the ventral surface, followed by release after a few
(26:27):
seconds of stimulation. This was repeated throughout each tickling session.
Even though the tickling was brisk and assertive, care was
taken not to frighten the animals. So yeah, I love
that language in describing the tickling of a rat, and
it sort of the nice, sort of detached clinical language
of the scientific study it is. But I would love
(26:48):
to see another study of the research assistance tickling to
see how it affected them, you know, did it? And
then maybe a follow up study with komodo dragons. Just
just proof, just to lose some toasts, just to lose
some So here are a couple other findings from the study.
Rats housed by themselves sought out tickling by humans more
(27:09):
than rats that shared their cages with other rats, which
was interesting, right. This is their way of maybe compensating
for a lack of social interaction. Rats who enjoyed the
tickling initiated play with the researchers, emitting more laughter and
play biding the hand when these are some of the
same features that you see with rat on rat play.
(27:29):
And rats that didn't like to be tickled tended to
be anxious and neurotic, while laughter prone rats were friendlier
and handled stress better. And this is really the crux
of this study, because it's not just about hey, let's
tickle some rats. It's more like, let's see how they're
using this very pro social behavior, laughter and tickling to
(27:53):
modulate the stresses of their life. And then let's look
at rodents who are tickle adverse, because there are some,
and try to bump this up against human mood disorders
and figure out what's going on. And lo and behold,
they found out this is really interesting, something called neurogenesis,
which is new nerve cell growth in the hippocampus. They
found that those cats, those cats, those rats that were
(28:16):
tickle adverse will they when they were tickled, didn't have
any surge in new uh nerve cell growth in the neurogenesis,
and those rats that did like to be tickled well,
had a ton of neurogenesis. And I thought that was
particularly poignant because if you you know, of course I'm
(28:39):
projecting here, but if you look at depression or mood
disorders and humans, you can see that when um, a
person is racked with anxiety or depression, it really is
paralyzing to the person. And then in this way you
see the same sort of thing playing out in the
neural substrate of a rat. So they you have it,
the laughing rat science of the laughing rat. Uh Julie
(29:01):
if you ever, I don't know, fallen in love with
the statue, and then your love for that statue made
that statue come alive into a living flesh being, well
not exactly a statue, but like a golemn. And it
was just once okay, al right, we get that's acceptable.
You know, we in our youth, we all have to
experiment with the unliving made flesh, and the golm was
(29:24):
going to come to life anyway. I just just hurrying
along the process. Yeah, it's true. I mean, it's one
of those cases where the Dear John letter that you
write is actually on the golemn's forehead as you change
the the uh the signal um. We're of course talking
about alluding to the Roman poet Ovid's Pigmalion tale. Right,
(29:45):
sculptor falls in love with the statue that he's created
and it comes to life. What does that have to
do with rats? Well, comes down to something that we
call the Pigmalion effect. Yeah, And in nineteen sixty three
there was a cologists, or there is a psychologist who
began to really look at this unconscious experiment or bias
(30:07):
as he called it. Then and Robert Rosenthal have been
really working with humans on this because he had this
hunch right that the experimenters were affecting the subjects that
they were studying, and so he wanted to look a
little bit further into this idea that you could unconsciously
affect the outcome of someone's performance. Um and now, by
(30:30):
the way, this is also called the expectancy effect and
the Rosenthal effect. And in order for him to really
build up his research, he turned to rats initially, and
in one of his early experiments he tested the effects
of the experimental expectancy on maze running performance. And he
had two groups of research students test rats wrongly informing
(30:54):
them either that the rats were specially bred to be
quote maze dull or quote maze bright maze runners like
in the young adult series and subsequent movies. Indeed, so
they were either Dollard's or quite clever, right, And this
is the idea that these research students had when they
(31:15):
were handling the rats. So in reality, of course, all
the rats were standard lab rats and they were randomly
assigned to the Dull group or the Bright group, and
the results show that the rats labeled as bright learned
the mazes more quickly than those labeled as dull. And
apparently the students had unconsciously influenced the performance of their
(31:38):
rats depending on what they had been told. So these
unconscious clues would play out in the way that they
handled the rats, so nurturing and careful for those clever
hans rats, right, or dismissive and more sort of brusque
movements with them with the ones that were considered dull.
(31:58):
And that was sort of like this earth shattering UH
idea that unconsciously you could be saying things or you
could have physical cues that would affect the person's performance. Yeah,
I mean we're getting into the power of stigma here,
the and the and the power of privilege and uh,
and there are of course obvious human ratifications here and
(32:21):
UH and Rosenthal was was was was definitely interested in those.
UH followed up with the Nive experiment in which children
were identified as growth s Burgers in school. The Grossburgers
not meaning that they're gonna grow from its league tall,
but rather they were expected to make academic strides. And
(32:43):
the thing is that they did, They followed their performance
and they showed. Yeah, the kids that were identified as
growth s Burgers, UH, definitely improved academically. But it comes
down to the same situation as the rats. They were
just selected at random. There was no weeding out of
who had you know what, what necessary criteria to succeed.
So UM, the idea here is that UM is that
(33:06):
you know they're they're in the classroom. They're labeled as
as special as growth spurgers, and so that affects, uh,
you know, the teacher student interaction, and it also affects
the students expectations of self. It gets into communication, warmth
of communication, the depth of the teaching, better feedback resources, uh, etcetera.
(33:28):
All because they went into it expecting thinking that this
particular child is going to achieve more than the one
next to it. Yeah, and that's huge, right because everyone
comes into the classroom with biases. There's no way to
get around it. But if you're aware of it, then
perhaps you can change your behavior and those kids can
(33:50):
get a fair shake. Carol Dweck, who we've mentioned before,
she's a psychologist and researcher at Stanford. She said, quote,
you may be standing farther away from someone you have
or expectations for. You may not be making as much
eye contact, and it's not something you can put your
finger on. We are not usually aware of how we
are conveying our expectations to other people, but it's there,
(34:13):
all right. So at this point in the podcast, we
find ourselves in kind of a post secretive nim viewing
situation where, uh, you know, obviously these uh, these these
lab rats and mice have contributed so much and will
continue to contribute to our medical research or understanding of
of what it is to be human and how we work.
But at the same time, we see, we see all
(34:34):
of this this science um backing up the idea that
they're they're more than just rats. They're a little more
like us than perhaps we're ready for. And yet, according
to an amendment made to the Animal Welfare Act in
two thousand and four, rats including mice of the genus Mews,
bread for research and labs and birds are not considered animals.
(34:58):
And this is a kind of semantic distancing. It's a
way for government agencies in the United States to get
around issues concerning personhood, paining, and empathy when using these animals,
particularly in these highly invasive experiments. Not just maze running here, yeah,
like actually like putting wires into the brain and and
(35:20):
and Endwarf's things. Yeah, and in actual studies on pain. Right. Um,
so it's just interesting that this this is an animal
that is not concerned animal and yet um, you know,
recent research is really beginning to show us to what
degree in particular empathy is available to this species and
(35:42):
not just this species but other species. Yeah. I mean
to think that this animal in this cage, in this
lab is technically lab equipment really from from from a
legal standpoint, um, but to your point, yeah, we end
up seeing the rat as more than mere vermin, more
than mere disease vectors, and handy by logical test subjects. Um,
(36:02):
what changes we find ourselves dealing with this? This new
branch of ethology ethology is the science of animal behavior. Uh.
This new branch is called cognitive ethology, and it's concerned
with the influence of conscious awareness and intention on the
behavior of an animal. So a lot of the research
stems from the work of zoologists Donald Griffin. But uh,
(36:25):
but you see it's spreading out. Really if you pay
attention to science headlines coming down the coming down the pike. Uh,
we regularly see research uh, not just mice, but a
variety of animals where we're we're really stopping and saying,
what is human consciousness? What are the sort of the
parameters we can pick out off on that outside of
our our blind brain bias and uh and and what
(36:47):
can we identify these other creatures? Because while you know,
we have plenty of informal accounts of rat consciousness that
have been around for a while doing no small part
to pet owners and animal lovers and and perhaps no
all part due to projection, uh, you know, projecting on them,
kind of having a Pygmalion effect with the animal to
make it more human and more live. But the thing
(37:08):
is now we're seeing neuroscientific backup for so many of
those feelings. Uh and again not just with rats, but
with a wild wide variety of animals. Yeah. I was
just thinking about our episode that we did on elephant empathy,
and here's a case where it's really apparent and there's
a whole lot of projecting, right, because this is this
(37:30):
gentle giant that we all know and love, and it's
got that trunk, and the trunk is very expressive and
as we have learned from Dr France to Wall who's
a biologists primatologists, um, elephants are are very perceptive, and
they get distressed when they see others in distress, and
they reach out to calm each other down. And it's
(37:51):
a not too dissimilar to a way that chimpanzees or
humans embrace one another. And we see that played out
in the animal mole world over and over again. So
we've reached this understanding of empathy and other animals, and
yet there still seems to be this dividing line, this
kind of human exceptionalism. Yeah, I mean, I mean the
(38:14):
basic question are humans exceptional? Are we something other than animals?
Are we some sort of highly evolved ascendant species above
everything else, or are we just highly evolved rat essentially
torturing our kin to advance our own scientific understanding of
the world. Like in researching this episode, I kept thinking
of of of this fortress of consciousness, you know this, uh,
(38:39):
this this fortress that humans have built, and for the
longest they are the only ones allowed to occupy the
inner protection of that fortress. And then eventually we learned
enough to say, all right, well, the great apes can
come in. Okay, you you guys have have some level
of of of consciousness and will admit that you can
live in some part, and there's no dispute how similar
we are. So I guess we gotta let you. I
gotta let you in the sciences on the table. And
(39:02):
yet we've discussed in previous episodes, we end up with
with data that emerges on other animals that we have
to at least some of us, have to let into
the fortress, you know, from dolphins and elephants to even
something like the the octopus, which is which has a
very different brain than our mammalian brain. But when you
(39:22):
start looking at it, when you start taking yourself outside
of the human uh bias and put it put yourself
in the octopus as much as possible, you have to
start questioning is this animal conscious too? So that brings
us back to rats. Are they truly empathetic? Are they
truly conscious on some level? And then if they are,
what happens to animal testing? How do you? What do
(39:44):
we do? I mean, we've already seen the whole situation
where with the legislation, we're almost preparing for that battle
by going ahead and uh and devaluing them to mere
lab equipment. Yeah. Well, some people would say too, when
it comes to empathy and rats, that it's just a
heightened form of the ootional contagion, right that these rats
are they're just feeling so um distraught over another rats,
(40:07):
distress that they're trying to make it stop. That it's
not necessarily empathy from an altruistic point of view. But
Peggy Mason, one of the lead researchers and there's rat
empathy studies, will say it takes a lot for a
rat to downgrade its own fear in that emotional contagion
situation in order to actually go and free the other rat.
(40:31):
So there's something more going on than just mirror emotional contagion.
And I really like this quote because Peggy Mason, I
think hit it right on the hat. She says she's
more than happy to consider herself a rat with a
fancy neo cortex. In other words, she there, there's the similarity,
(40:51):
is there? We just kind of have this nice, beautiful
neo cortex sitting atop our already rat nous. Yeah. I
mean I think of it in terms of word processes.
I end up writing a lot in Microsoft. Word has
lots of bells and whistles, many of which I don't
even use. It has all your spell check and what
have you But then there's also just Microsoft Text, which
is just pretty basic. But is it fair to say
(41:12):
that word is a word processor and text is not
a word processor when they both essentially do the same thing,
except one is a little more complex than the other.
Well in one, right, So it's empathy in both scripts,
right one just one is just maybe we can talk
about more, right, because we have the facility to in
our own language. But who knows that rats aren't talking
about empathy in their own language, which is I know,
(41:34):
sort of crazy. But these are these are ideas circulating
um And the idea here too is that empathy for
humans allows us to momentarily occupy the mind space of another.
And the idea of that is that when we can
do this, we can help support one another. We can
guess what's going on, we can make predictions. It is
(41:56):
one of the cornerstones of a civilization. Cooperation and the
ability to um you know, put some sort of pattern
recognition into place. And to say that this is only
available to primates is you know, looking to be more
and more erroneous of a line of logic. But what
happens when those um high thinking, self aware humans inevitably
(42:20):
bite the dust, either due to their own mismanagement of
their resources, their misuse of their weapons, or just some
cosmic calamity that comes crashing down from the sky. What
happens to the meager ratituli. What happens to the meager rat,
Rats will take revenge. That's right. So when the sixth
mass extinction occurs, rats may just be the Winner's here.
(42:44):
We're not saying this is fact. This is largely a
thought experiment thought up by John Zalo Swiss, a geologist
at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom. He
studies Earth history and his colleagues and he we're just
kind of sitting around thinking, Hey, what if we're at
the edge of a mass extinction, what animal would be
(43:07):
most likely to survive and repopulate the Earth. Yeah, and
he contends it's the rat, because we discussed their survivors.
They are, they have all the skills they need to
survive and thrive in new environments. They pretty much colonize
the entire world and they stiffer stand toe to toe
with humans on that on that particular accomplishment. Uh So,
(43:28):
when the environment changes, when the world changes in a
way that completely leaves humanity behind. These are gonna be
the rats are gonna be one of those species that
can that can actually thrive in this vastly new world.
And of course there's gonna they're gonna be some additional
mutations as well, that's right. Uh, they may be larger.
That's the idea that Zalaswitz was talking about. Here is
(43:53):
the time frame of this purported rat takeover would be
about three million to ten million years from now end,
based on previous rates of repopulation after mass extinctions, as
thought that the rat would grow much larger in size
um And again, you know, again this is a thought experiment,
but it makes a lot of sense when you look
(44:14):
at how wildly they are, and how they repopulate or
reproduce so quickly, and how clever and social they are. Yeah,
I mean, it's it's not that difficult to imagine a
future in which intelligent mutated rats are are running the
streets and there are no humans around. Now, will they
have mutated turtles in their midst as well? I don't know.
(44:38):
I leave that for the scientists to decide. I think
you're you are you excited about that notion? I am, because,
because of course, in teenage Ninja turtles. You have splinter
the intelligent rat, remember and uh, and of course that
leads to turtles, and then from there it just gets
It's it's crazy, but maybe that comic and TV shows
actually add blimps into our future, which just reminds us
all again that the little blip on the radar of
(45:00):
time that we all are all right on that count. Hey.
If you want to check out more episodes of this podcast,
um more blog post videos linkside our social media accounts,
you can do so by visiting stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. If you have thoughts about rats that
you want to share with us, or any other animals really,
particularly concerning empathy, please send us your thoughts at below
(45:23):
the mind at how stuff works dot com. For more
on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff
works dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
when was the last time you saw a live rat? Ha? Ha?
I saw a huge rat at the zoo once, Yeah,
(00:25):
in in an exhibit. No, just running across the path.
And that's not surprising, right, because the zoo has lots
and lots of food at any animals dispose. Also, I'm
sure that rats hang out there quite a bit. Okay,
a little similarly, I last time I saw a live
rat outside of the confines of a pet store was
when I was taking the public transportation around here, Martha.
(00:47):
The drain that is at times kind of a subway,
and indeed I get to see a nice fat subway
rat running around under the tracks, which for me is
always kind of a treat because it, you know, it
brings to mind more you know, opic ideals of the underworld. Um.
And at the same time it's also I can't help
but I think it's a little gross because obviously the
(01:08):
rat is there because there's plenty of garbage. Dat well,
there's something very outlaw and charming about these rats to
dwelling in a subterranean world, right, and we tend to
think of them more in really negative terms, thinking about
them as vectors of disease. But as we're going to
explore today, rats are one of the most successful species,
(01:30):
and rats they're just like us that we have a
lot in common with them. Indeed, now we don't want
to completely discredit the whole disease vector thing because according
to the CDC there that they're These are just some
of the key diseases transmitted by rodents. There's a hantavirus,
pulmonary syndrome, hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome, a loss of fever,
(01:53):
a leptospirosis, lymphocitic chronomeningitis, o hemorrhage, fee ever, plague, rat
bite fever, someone elis, someon elysis, and several South American
arena viruses. Well, you know this is how I feel
about being a rat. You probably want to have a
heavy reputation like that, right because you're out there on
(02:15):
the streets, the mean streets. You want to mean persona like, hey,
I might accidentally give you some sort of plague or
or not so accidentally so don't mess with me. And
when you start to think about rats in this way,
their survival instincts, you can really look at them as
more of it's just this sort of pestilence underground, but
(02:36):
more as the uh the largest collective holders of real
estate in major metropolitan areas, specifically Manhattan, because we should
really consider this rich life of the rat there, which
arrives sometimes in the eighteen hundreds. We're talking about Rattus norvegicus,
and it has made itself so ubiquitous that just it's
(02:59):
very presence is sort of one of those defining features
of New York City when you think about New York, right,
and they have successfully lived off the detritus of humans.
And you can follow droppings nearly anywhere if you want
to write, and you'll find a path between walls, nod
between bricks, and then just knowing that there's this whole
(03:23):
other species, is life thriving beneath our feet or between
our walls, and sometimes even coming up through our toilet bowl.
I think about that in the middle of the night sometimes,
and I have to admit, when I am in New York,
if I don't see a rat, I feel a little
let down like it's it's it should's part of the experience,
(03:44):
you know. So if there's not one appearing naturally, I
kind of want to hire somebody to just let a
rat trained one run across the street in front of me. UM. Now,
when you get into the exact numbers of rats in Manhattan,
I bring this up because it was recently in the news. UM.
Past estimates of range from an extreme infestation of twenty
(04:04):
eight million rats to uh the other more conservative estimates
of eight point four million UM. But recently there's a
study that came out from Jonathan Arbach, a PhD candidate
at Columbia University, and he's crunched the numbers and he
thinks that it's less than that, probably more like two million.
But basically, any way you shake it, we're talking about
(04:27):
a lot of rats living in this great metropolis. Yeah,
that's a decent sized population. And it's really easy to
start actually going the rout a two year oute to
and projecting, um, your human qualities are our human qualities
onto them. UM. But as we will explore later on,
there really are a lot of parallels between routes and humans. UM.
(04:50):
But one of the things that's often overlooked is that
there's quite a bit of contribution from rats, albeit not voluntarily.
That's right. We're getting on the ratitui area and getting
into more of the secretive nim area here, right. Um.
As it turns out, of all lab animals are mice
and rats according to the Foundation for Biomedical Research, and
(05:14):
that is that is quite a lot. Because you think
of lab animals, right um. You know, you also tend
to throw in chimps and you think of experiments on
rabbits or what have you, but or even some things
like ecoli and some of the jazzery experiments that we've
discussed here in the past. But when you come back
down to it, it's the rodents that are carrying most
of the load. And why is this, Well, a lot
(05:36):
of it has to do with convenience, right. Rats are
small in size, they're easily housed, you can easily maintain
them in captivity, and they're fairly adaptive to new surroundings.
I mean, obviously there are plenty of species out there
that that you cannot keep in captivity. They just do
not survive. They just completely fail if you try to
house them. The rat, however, one of its skills as adaptations. Hey,
(06:00):
it adapts well to this captive lifestyle. Also, rats reproduce
like crazy, and they don't live more than two or
three years. So if you have a study and you
need to look at several generations all the creature to see, uh,
see how your studies panning out, you can do that
in a short period of human time. You know. Now,
they're they're no ecoli. Heck, the E. Coli long term
(06:22):
evolution experiment that we've discussed here before has seen more
than fifty thou generations passed in just twenty five years.
But rats and mice boast other key advantages. They're also
cheap to acquire. You can buy lab mice and rats
in bulk from commercial suppliers, so there's no hanging around
around looking like a creepy person at the local pet store,
(06:42):
you know, with your burlap sack. And then when it
comes to actually handling them, uh, this is a pretty
uh mild tempered creature. You can reach into the cage,
you can get them out, you can you can handle them.
You don't need a you know, an electric prod to
deal with the lab rat. Right, They're highly portable and
their genetic biological and behavior characteristics closely resemble those of humans,
(07:06):
making them really ideal to study. So, as you mentioned,
because they reproduce so quickly, you can tinker around with genetics,
and within just a couple of generations you can you
can begin to take some sort of hypothesis and then
put it into study by tinkering with the genetics and
seeing what the outcome is, which of course informs what
(07:27):
we're trying to do medically with humans. And when I
say informing, I mean really the contributions to a ton
of diseases and conditions that we have been studying through wraps.
And what exactly have they helped with? Well, according to
Life Sciences article wy do medical researchers use mice, they've
assisted with the following uh standing in as human models, hypertension, diabetes, cataracts, obesity, seizures,
(07:55):
respiratory problems, deafness, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, cancer, cystic fibrosis,
HIV and AIDS, heart disease, muscular drift dystrophy, and spinal
cord injuries. And in addition to all that, we regularly
turned to mice for varying studies that concern behavioral sensory, aging, nutrition,
(08:16):
and genetic studies, as well as the treatment of drug addictions. Yeah,
so that's quite a resume that that rats and mice have.
Now consider that rats were first used in the lab
at the turn of the century by researchers believe in
Chicago and at Clark University. So at first it was
just the humble rodent maze that they would run through
(08:37):
to try to give us some ideas about the more
behavioral aspects of rats. Now fast forward to today and
they're actually occupying a far loftier space and studies. And
one of the loftiest uh that I could think of
is something called the Human Brain Project. And and this
(09:01):
is something that neuroscientist Henry Markham has been toiling away
at for years and we've talked about it before, to
this idea that you could reverse engineer of the human brain.
And this is a very ambitious project to complete a
or to build a complete model of a human brain.
And we're talking from snapsis to hemispheres and then simulate
(09:23):
it on a supercomputer. That is incredibly complex and ambitious.
So what do you do, Well, you have to start
with the basics and the basics in this case is
the neo cortex of a rat, and Markham has simulated
the behavior of a millionaire on portion of this rat
neo cortex and this has given Markham a lot of
(09:45):
new insight into everything from the expression of individual rat
genes to the organizing principles of rat brains. And the
team Market Seeing has published some of that data impair
reviewed journals. But they're also beginning to integrate it into
this cohesive model so that they can simulate it onto
(10:06):
an IBM blue gene supercomputer, which will all then um
lead to this human brain project. Now, if this human
brain project is successful, we're talking about building a plug
and play brain. Um, you could take it apart to
figure out what the causes of brain disease are. You
could rig it to robotics and develop a whole new
(10:26):
range of intelligent technologies. You could strap on a pair
of virtual reality classes and experience a brain other than
your own. Now, the big question here, a lot of
naysayers say, can you can this model scale, can you
go from a rat brain to a human brain? And
can this be done to that sort of complex um
(10:49):
level of detail. We don't know yet, But if it's successful.
The reason it is is because it began with rats.
All right, Well, on that note, we're going to take
a break, and when we come back, canna get into
how rats are essentially just like us. All Right, we're back. Um.
(11:13):
You know, we've been discussing the way we use rats
in experiments in the past, how they're going to factor
into our further explorations of the human mind and the
human body in the future. And in doing this, it's
it's already pretty obvious that you can't just look at
this rat as a as a mere furry earthworm that
we can just you just inject things into and see
(11:34):
how it plays out in sort of a generic organism.
There's a lot of there seems to be a lot
more of a linkage between what it is to be
a rat and what it is to be a human.
That's right, And so that introduces us to these human
like things that we like to define ourselves by. I'm
talking about this idea that we could exhibit regret, or empathy,
(11:57):
or even meta cognition, this idea that we could think
about thinking that seems like something that only primates can do, right,
But in fact, there are studies that will point you
into the direction of rats being able to exhibit this
as well. Indeed, for instance, rats being able to feel regret.
This one is really fascinating. This one is from a
(12:18):
study that came out in two thousand fourteen published in
the journal Nature Neuroscience from It's a University of Minnesota
study from Adam P. Steiner and A. David reddish Um.
The key findings here are that rats who made a
bad choice registered regret in the same part of the
brain that humans are believed to show regret, the orbitofrontal cortex.
(12:39):
And they also seem to look back on past regrets
in the same way that humans do um. In other words,
the rat is thinking about what it should have done now.
The study itself has a lot to to to line
up with human dyning UH do. Like, have you ever
found yourself in a situation where there's a restaurant you
really want to dine at, You go air it's too crowded.
(13:02):
I have and then what what do you do? I
go to another one sort of grudgingly, yes, exactly, And
so this is kind of what they were setting out
to do with the with the rats too. In the
rats UH study, this model of of having to fall
back on a plan, be adjusting your your your plans,
and then how you think about past and future choices.
(13:22):
The rats in this study were given the chance to
feed on four flavors and four different feeding stations. Banana
always a jazzy choice, cherry also good chocolate everyone loves it,
and unflavored, which leaves a lot to be desired. Now,
each rat is going to have its own in this experiment,
had its own preferences on and its own patients level
regarding how long they're gonna wait for something they want
(13:44):
to eat, you know, just like any of us as
we go out to get that meal on say a
Friday date night or what have you. Um So, when
the rats arrived at a station, a tone would let
them know how long they would have to wait for
their grub. And that could be one second way, or
it could be a forty five second way. And again,
if you're only living up to three years, that forty
five second way is maybe a little more substantial. The
(14:07):
researchers found that the rats decided to stay or go
based on that tone based on the perspective weight, the
same way humans would with a crowded restaurant. You know,
two hour Wait, screw that, I'm going to Denny's and
there I'm gonna eat it fast and angry, and then
I'm moving on. And it was the same with the rats,
but much much like a human that goes to to
Denny's over the latest fusion dining sensation, the rats who
(14:28):
skipped out on quality um favorite show for something faster
and then showed regret. Uh. And then researchers observed the
brain activity of via a little invasive tinkering and indicated
that the rats were engaged in what they called mental
time travel. So they're imagining the alternate reality of eating
in the restaurant that it skipped and the that ability,
(14:50):
of course, is core to so much of the human experience,
right the regretting the past, worrying over the future, the
entire wheel of human suffering, because uh uh. As the
rats quickly angerate their lackluster plan B meals, they were
already plotting the next better meal, which I mean, this
is a very human thing, right, Like how many times
have you anger eaten at a place which you're like,
(15:13):
I really didn't want to do this, yeah, or even
if it's still good, you're kind of like all right,
well this is good, but I really wanted to try
that ramen, you know, yeah, I mean, and the regret
is it feels like one of those really human things.
So it's interesting to see it played out in this context. Now,
another thing that UM has been a bit of a
surprise here in the last five years is this idea
(15:35):
that rats can exhibit empathy. And so the next study
that we're going to talk about UM covers empathy, but
it also covers chocolate. As you mentioned before, Like this
turns out to be one of rats favorite snacks, and
like this is a very important thing in the world
of rats if you have access to chocolate. And this
will come into play in a moment. So two thousand eleven, Neurosciences,
(16:00):
Peggy Mason, she devised an experiment where two rat mates
were housed together for a few weeks, and then she
placed one into a transparent tube that could only be
opened from the outside. Now, the other rat, the free rat,
was pretty curious. It was kind of sniffing around, and
perhaps it was even a little bit frightened because it
(16:21):
didn't immediately open the door. There's this idea that it
could be experiencing something called emotional contagion. This this sort
of fear that um in a group situation where you
feel that other person's fear and is very uncomfortable. Right,
So it's possible that that rat was kind of shying
away at first, but once it kind of got this idea, oh,
(16:45):
my friend just trapped in here, or my cage mates
trapped in here, over and over again they would see
that this rat would release the other rat that was
trapped in the container. Now, the researchers had variations on
this experiment. In one case, they put a fake rat
in the container, which kind of like, come on, guys,
you know rats are pretty smart. They're going to realize
(17:07):
that that's a fake rat. And of course they did
not try to release the fake rat. And then they
had another version in which they presented a rat holding
container um with a ratit and another one another rat
holding container which contained chocolate. So this is where the
willpower comes in, because again, here's this thing in front
(17:27):
of you. This chocolate is the your most prized possession
of your tiny rat life if you can access this.
And what they found is that the rodents, the free ones,
would actually go and free the cage mate and then
they would go and get the chocolate, and not only
would they get the chocolate second as this altruistic act,
but they would share it with the cage mate. There's
(17:50):
there's many a human that would not do that. I
feel exactly right, and so this is very pro social behavior.
And there was a follow ups study in two thousand
and fourteen and the idea was, well, what happens if
you put uh like rats in with other rats, so
(18:10):
like meaning all albino, And then you do a sort
of variation on that and you take say a black
hooded rat with albino rat. Would they free each other
even though they're of different strains. What they found is
that when they had albino rats that were complete strangers,
and the free albino rat came across the stranger albino
(18:31):
rat that was in the container, it would free it. Okay,
if they put this is the short and dirty of this. Okay,
if they put the black hooded rat in a container
and they were both strangers, the albino rat would not
free it. However, if later on the albino rat was
housed with the black hooded rat, it would free it.
(18:55):
So it had to have some sort of relationship or
environmental contact with it. And then they found out too
that once the albino rat had the experience with a
different strain i e. The black hooded rat, that it
would then release other strangers who happened to be black
hooded rats. And the implications of that are really interesting
(19:17):
because you see that play out in society. Right, we
see a stranger, we're not so certain about that person,
we're not so trusting. We don't know if we want
to help that person because they are apart from us, right,
But once you experienced that person as another, as part
of your circle, or you relate with that to that person,
then you want to help that person. Right. Yeah. It's
(19:39):
like straight up enemy mind with Dennis Quaid and Lewis
Gossip Jr. It's the human and the alien and they
hate each other in the crash land on the same planet.
But then they learn, uh that they get to know
each other, they have respect for each other, and suddenly
they're looking after each other against a greater enemy. Yeah.
And so what I think is interesting about that is
that it kind of proves that this idea that the
(19:59):
more diversity that have aren't exposed to well, the more
empathy that you can exhibit, and the more connection that
you have with your fellow rats or your fellow humans,
and moreover, According to Benamy Bartel, who is one of
the researchers on the two thousand and fourteen project, he said, quote,
we share the same neural structure with rats that we
use for our own epathetic responses. Our brain structures are
(20:23):
responding in the same way. They are shaped in the
same way when it comes to those sort of responses
that require us to be empathetic. Now, at this point
you might be saying, all right, well, that's that's all
well and good. They can display some level of of empathy.
But what about what about higher thought? What about higher
levels of human thoughts such as um meta cognition. Uh,
(20:45):
we're talking the ability to reflect on one's own mental processes.
And this is this key stuff to human experience. Right,
this is enough that makes or can make us rational animals.
It's it's about realizing, oh, I I don't have enough
in my head to call this problem. I need to
do some homework. Or in loftier scenarios, it's the straight
(21:05):
up sort of meditative that car tot a kind of
a situation where you're stepping outside of your own thoughts
and looking at them. Well, four rats, we see this
as well. At two thousand seven, studied by researchers at
the University of Georgia, the researchers trained rats to press
a lever when they heard a short burst of static,
and another one when they heard a long burst of static.
(21:25):
Push the correct one, rat, and you will get a
food pellet. Push the wrong one and you get nothing. Uh.
It's it's what we call a duration discrimination test. And
there's an additional catch here. If the rats decline the
test completely, they receive a smaller reward anyway, like a
half pellet. I can think of it as a consolation prize,
you know. It's like a big moment on the game
(21:47):
show where you can you can go for the big
prize behind door number three, or just take home the
washing machine that you already won. Now that probably sounds
all pretty straightforward, right, But then the researchers start tinkering
with the links of the static bird, making it harder
for the rats to aceh the test and reap the rewards.
So the core findings here when when the rats were
uncertain about what they knew about the test and its parameters.
(22:11):
They find themselves unsure how long has that burst? In
which level am I supposed to to pull? They just
cut their losses. They go with the smaller reward. In
other words, they admit that they don't know, they're thinking
about thinking um and that there they realize their understanding
of the situation is it's strong enough and it's better
not to play and take that consolation prize. You know
(22:33):
what I like about this is that it's first of
all the fact that those medium tones which were ambiguous,
you know, like it's easy to get those short and
long ones right for humans, but those ambiguous ones are
hard for us as well. I mean, it's not just rats.
And I like that they that they are admitting to
a certain degree like I'm not quite sure what my
(22:54):
path is. But also there's this kind of like Vegas
odds thing at work here, Like I feel like there's
going to be a round to to the Vegas version.
But the next movie, the sequel, goes to Vegas. It
would be good stuff. Now have you ever seen a
magazine called US? I think it's called US. Yes, I've
seen it in UM in grocery stores. Yeah, it's kind
(23:18):
of like the uh like that. I don't want to
say the downtrodden version of people, but maybe like the
less glossy in journalistically competent version is this one that
they put the screens over sometimes in grocery stores because
the headlines are too sexy. I don't think there are
two sexy. They're just really like very celebrity driven to
(23:38):
a certain degree that's completely ridiculous. In fact, they have
a section and I've seen this in my doctor's office,
and the section is celebrities just like us. It'll show
like Britney Spears getting you know, some Starbucks coffee or
something like that, and it's so ridiculously funny. And because
it's you know, yes, they're human, that's actually probably a
(23:58):
good message for um, for your checkoutline reading or waiting
room reading, because at least in the the checkoutline you
do see those horrible headlines where it's where they're just
treating these celebrities like like animals on display, and it's
good to remember their human on some level. Yeah, And
that's a lovely way to put it, that like animals
on display. And so you kind of half expect when
(24:20):
you're going through one of these things, and you start
thinking about rats to see this in the same light,
like rats they're just like us. They laugh And I'm
sure you guys out there have heard about this before,
but rats do laugh and they can be tickled. Um.
This was found out in the nineties by neuroscientists Shack
Bounds pans kept p A. N. K. Svpp and his
(24:40):
colleagues that begin to eavesdrop on frolicking rats, and they
found out that when they were playing, or they were
just about to play, they were anticipating, they emitted this
unique fifty killer hurts chip chirp. And it was only
during that time they figured out this chirp was kind
of like a laugh. And so one thing led to another,
(25:04):
as they do, and they found themselves in the lab
tickling rodents and what they call somato sensory stimulation. And
in fact, when they did this, they found that rats
emitted more laughter when being tickled by people than during
any other activity. Now, I have to say it that
(25:25):
aspect of this kind of chills me because have you
ever been tickled against your will? It's terrible. It is
you you feel like it's it's like being assaulted in
a funny way. Yeah. Yeah, it's like you're like stop
and you're laughing, and it just feels like this grotesque moment.
You can't stop laughing, and yet you don't want to
(25:46):
be tickled, and so the signals aren't matching up. Yeah.
Like it's interesting to watch my son react to it,
because he'll, you know, if you tickle him. It's like
it's very much like he's laughing uncontrollably. He's under attack.
He's like stop, stop, stop, and then you stop and
he says, do it again, right right, So pan's kept
in their colleagues, they described their tickling method fustly, so
(26:07):
keep that in mind. These these rats that are like
tickle me, don't tickle me, tickle me to don't take me,
they say. Quote. The tickling was done with the right
hand and consisted of rapid initial finger movements across the
back with a focus on the neck, followed by rapidly
turning the animals over on their backs with vigorous tickling
of the ventral surface, followed by release after a few
(26:27):
seconds of stimulation. This was repeated throughout each tickling session.
Even though the tickling was brisk and assertive, care was
taken not to frighten the animals. So yeah, I love
that language in describing the tickling of a rat, and
it sort of the nice, sort of detached clinical language
of the scientific study it is. But I would love
(26:48):
to see another study of the research assistance tickling to
see how it affected them, you know, did it? And
then maybe a follow up study with komodo dragons. Just
just proof, just to lose some toasts, just to lose
some So here are a couple other findings from the study.
Rats housed by themselves sought out tickling by humans more
(27:09):
than rats that shared their cages with other rats, which
was interesting, right. This is their way of maybe compensating
for a lack of social interaction. Rats who enjoyed the
tickling initiated play with the researchers, emitting more laughter and
play biding the hand when these are some of the
same features that you see with rat on rat play.
(27:29):
And rats that didn't like to be tickled tended to
be anxious and neurotic, while laughter prone rats were friendlier
and handled stress better. And this is really the crux
of this study, because it's not just about hey, let's
tickle some rats. It's more like, let's see how they're
using this very pro social behavior, laughter and tickling to
(27:53):
modulate the stresses of their life. And then let's look
at rodents who are tickle adverse, because there are some,
and try to bump this up against human mood disorders
and figure out what's going on. And lo and behold,
they found out this is really interesting, something called neurogenesis,
which is new nerve cell growth in the hippocampus. They
found that those cats, those cats, those rats that were
(28:16):
tickle adverse will they when they were tickled, didn't have
any surge in new uh nerve cell growth in the neurogenesis,
and those rats that did like to be tickled well,
had a ton of neurogenesis. And I thought that was
particularly poignant because if you you know, of course I'm
(28:39):
projecting here, but if you look at depression or mood
disorders and humans, you can see that when um, a
person is racked with anxiety or depression, it really is
paralyzing to the person. And then in this way you
see the same sort of thing playing out in the
neural substrate of a rat. So they you have it,
the laughing rat science of the laughing rat. Uh Julie
(29:01):
if you ever, I don't know, fallen in love with
the statue, and then your love for that statue made
that statue come alive into a living flesh being, well
not exactly a statue, but like a golemn. And it
was just once okay, al right, we get that's acceptable.
You know, we in our youth, we all have to
experiment with the unliving made flesh, and the golm was
(29:24):
going to come to life anyway. I just just hurrying
along the process. Yeah, it's true. I mean, it's one
of those cases where the Dear John letter that you
write is actually on the golemn's forehead as you change
the the uh the signal um. We're of course talking
about alluding to the Roman poet Ovid's Pigmalion tale. Right,
(29:45):
sculptor falls in love with the statue that he's created
and it comes to life. What does that have to
do with rats? Well, comes down to something that we
call the Pigmalion effect. Yeah, And in nineteen sixty three
there was a cologists, or there is a psychologist who
began to really look at this unconscious experiment or bias
(30:07):
as he called it. Then and Robert Rosenthal have been
really working with humans on this because he had this
hunch right that the experimenters were affecting the subjects that
they were studying, and so he wanted to look a
little bit further into this idea that you could unconsciously
affect the outcome of someone's performance. Um and now, by
(30:30):
the way, this is also called the expectancy effect and
the Rosenthal effect. And in order for him to really
build up his research, he turned to rats initially, and
in one of his early experiments he tested the effects
of the experimental expectancy on maze running performance. And he
had two groups of research students test rats wrongly informing
(30:54):
them either that the rats were specially bred to be
quote maze dull or quote maze bright maze runners like
in the young adult series and subsequent movies. Indeed, so
they were either Dollard's or quite clever, right, And this
is the idea that these research students had when they
(31:15):
were handling the rats. So in reality, of course, all
the rats were standard lab rats and they were randomly
assigned to the Dull group or the Bright group, and
the results show that the rats labeled as bright learned
the mazes more quickly than those labeled as dull. And
apparently the students had unconsciously influenced the performance of their
(31:38):
rats depending on what they had been told. So these
unconscious clues would play out in the way that they
handled the rats, so nurturing and careful for those clever
hans rats, right, or dismissive and more sort of brusque
movements with them with the ones that were considered dull.
(31:58):
And that was sort of like this earth shattering UH
idea that unconsciously you could be saying things or you
could have physical cues that would affect the person's performance. Yeah,
I mean we're getting into the power of stigma here,
the and the and the power of privilege and uh,
and there are of course obvious human ratifications here and
(32:21):
UH and Rosenthal was was was was definitely interested in those.
UH followed up with the Nive experiment in which children
were identified as growth s Burgers in school. The Grossburgers
not meaning that they're gonna grow from its league tall,
but rather they were expected to make academic strides. And
(32:43):
the thing is that they did, They followed their performance
and they showed. Yeah, the kids that were identified as
growth s Burgers, UH, definitely improved academically. But it comes
down to the same situation as the rats. They were
just selected at random. There was no weeding out of
who had you know what, what necessary criteria to succeed.
So UM, the idea here is that UM is that
(33:06):
you know they're they're in the classroom. They're labeled as
as special as growth spurgers, and so that affects, uh,
you know, the teacher student interaction, and it also affects
the students expectations of self. It gets into communication, warmth
of communication, the depth of the teaching, better feedback resources, uh, etcetera.
(33:28):
All because they went into it expecting thinking that this
particular child is going to achieve more than the one
next to it. Yeah, and that's huge, right because everyone
comes into the classroom with biases. There's no way to
get around it. But if you're aware of it, then
perhaps you can change your behavior and those kids can
(33:50):
get a fair shake. Carol Dweck, who we've mentioned before,
she's a psychologist and researcher at Stanford. She said, quote,
you may be standing farther away from someone you have
or expectations for. You may not be making as much
eye contact, and it's not something you can put your
finger on. We are not usually aware of how we
are conveying our expectations to other people, but it's there,
(34:13):
all right. So at this point in the podcast, we
find ourselves in kind of a post secretive nim viewing
situation where, uh, you know, obviously these uh, these these
lab rats and mice have contributed so much and will
continue to contribute to our medical research or understanding of
of what it is to be human and how we work.
But at the same time, we see, we see all
(34:34):
of this this science um backing up the idea that
they're they're more than just rats. They're a little more
like us than perhaps we're ready for. And yet, according
to an amendment made to the Animal Welfare Act in
two thousand and four, rats including mice of the genus Mews,
bread for research and labs and birds are not considered animals.
(34:58):
And this is a kind of semantic distancing. It's a
way for government agencies in the United States to get
around issues concerning personhood, paining, and empathy when using these animals,
particularly in these highly invasive experiments. Not just maze running here, yeah,
like actually like putting wires into the brain and and
(35:20):
and Endwarf's things. Yeah, and in actual studies on pain. Right. Um,
so it's just interesting that this this is an animal
that is not concerned animal and yet um, you know,
recent research is really beginning to show us to what
degree in particular empathy is available to this species and
(35:42):
not just this species but other species. Yeah. I mean
to think that this animal in this cage, in this
lab is technically lab equipment really from from from a
legal standpoint, um, but to your point, yeah, we end
up seeing the rat as more than mere vermin, more
than mere disease vectors, and handy by logical test subjects. Um,
(36:02):
what changes we find ourselves dealing with this? This new
branch of ethology ethology is the science of animal behavior. Uh.
This new branch is called cognitive ethology, and it's concerned
with the influence of conscious awareness and intention on the
behavior of an animal. So a lot of the research
stems from the work of zoologists Donald Griffin. But uh,
(36:25):
but you see it's spreading out. Really if you pay
attention to science headlines coming down the coming down the pike. Uh,
we regularly see research uh, not just mice, but a
variety of animals where we're we're really stopping and saying,
what is human consciousness? What are the sort of the
parameters we can pick out off on that outside of
our our blind brain bias and uh and and what
(36:47):
can we identify these other creatures? Because while you know,
we have plenty of informal accounts of rat consciousness that
have been around for a while doing no small part
to pet owners and animal lovers and and perhaps no
all part due to projection, uh, you know, projecting on them,
kind of having a Pygmalion effect with the animal to
make it more human and more live. But the thing
(37:08):
is now we're seeing neuroscientific backup for so many of
those feelings. Uh and again not just with rats, but
with a wild wide variety of animals. Yeah. I was
just thinking about our episode that we did on elephant empathy,
and here's a case where it's really apparent and there's
a whole lot of projecting, right, because this is this
(37:30):
gentle giant that we all know and love, and it's
got that trunk, and the trunk is very expressive and
as we have learned from Dr France to Wall who's
a biologists primatologists, um, elephants are are very perceptive, and
they get distressed when they see others in distress, and
they reach out to calm each other down. And it's
(37:51):
a not too dissimilar to a way that chimpanzees or
humans embrace one another. And we see that played out
in the animal mole world over and over again. So
we've reached this understanding of empathy and other animals, and
yet there still seems to be this dividing line, this
kind of human exceptionalism. Yeah, I mean, I mean the
(38:14):
basic question are humans exceptional? Are we something other than animals?
Are we some sort of highly evolved ascendant species above
everything else, or are we just highly evolved rat essentially
torturing our kin to advance our own scientific understanding of
the world. Like in researching this episode, I kept thinking
of of of this fortress of consciousness, you know this, uh,
(38:39):
this this fortress that humans have built, and for the
longest they are the only ones allowed to occupy the
inner protection of that fortress. And then eventually we learned
enough to say, all right, well, the great apes can
come in. Okay, you you guys have have some level
of of of consciousness and will admit that you can
live in some part, and there's no dispute how similar
we are. So I guess we gotta let you. I
gotta let you in the sciences on the table. And
(39:02):
yet we've discussed in previous episodes, we end up with
with data that emerges on other animals that we have
to at least some of us, have to let into
the fortress, you know, from dolphins and elephants to even
something like the the octopus, which is which has a
very different brain than our mammalian brain. But when you
(39:22):
start looking at it, when you start taking yourself outside
of the human uh bias and put it put yourself
in the octopus as much as possible, you have to
start questioning is this animal conscious too? So that brings
us back to rats. Are they truly empathetic? Are they
truly conscious on some level? And then if they are,
what happens to animal testing? How do you? What do
(39:44):
we do? I mean, we've already seen the whole situation
where with the legislation, we're almost preparing for that battle
by going ahead and uh and devaluing them to mere
lab equipment. Yeah. Well, some people would say too, when
it comes to empathy and rats, that it's just a
heightened form of the ootional contagion, right that these rats
are they're just feeling so um distraught over another rats,
(40:07):
distress that they're trying to make it stop. That it's
not necessarily empathy from an altruistic point of view. But
Peggy Mason, one of the lead researchers and there's rat
empathy studies, will say it takes a lot for a
rat to downgrade its own fear in that emotional contagion
situation in order to actually go and free the other rat.
(40:31):
So there's something more going on than just mirror emotional contagion.
And I really like this quote because Peggy Mason, I
think hit it right on the hat. She says she's
more than happy to consider herself a rat with a
fancy neo cortex. In other words, she there, there's the similarity,
(40:51):
is there? We just kind of have this nice, beautiful
neo cortex sitting atop our already rat nous. Yeah. I
mean I think of it in terms of word processes.
I end up writing a lot in Microsoft. Word has
lots of bells and whistles, many of which I don't
even use. It has all your spell check and what
have you But then there's also just Microsoft Text, which
is just pretty basic. But is it fair to say
(41:12):
that word is a word processor and text is not
a word processor when they both essentially do the same thing,
except one is a little more complex than the other.
Well in one, right, So it's empathy in both scripts,
right one just one is just maybe we can talk
about more, right, because we have the facility to in
our own language. But who knows that rats aren't talking
about empathy in their own language, which is I know,
(41:34):
sort of crazy. But these are these are ideas circulating
um And the idea here too is that empathy for
humans allows us to momentarily occupy the mind space of another.
And the idea of that is that when we can
do this, we can help support one another. We can
guess what's going on, we can make predictions. It is
(41:56):
one of the cornerstones of a civilization. Cooperation and the
ability to um you know, put some sort of pattern
recognition into place. And to say that this is only
available to primates is you know, looking to be more
and more erroneous of a line of logic. But what
happens when those um high thinking, self aware humans inevitably
(42:20):
bite the dust, either due to their own mismanagement of
their resources, their misuse of their weapons, or just some
cosmic calamity that comes crashing down from the sky. What
happens to the meager ratituli. What happens to the meager rat,
Rats will take revenge. That's right. So when the sixth
mass extinction occurs, rats may just be the Winner's here.
(42:44):
We're not saying this is fact. This is largely a
thought experiment thought up by John Zalo Swiss, a geologist
at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom. He
studies Earth history and his colleagues and he we're just
kind of sitting around thinking, Hey, what if we're at
the edge of a mass extinction, what animal would be
(43:07):
most likely to survive and repopulate the Earth. Yeah, and
he contends it's the rat, because we discussed their survivors.
They are, they have all the skills they need to
survive and thrive in new environments. They pretty much colonize
the entire world and they stiffer stand toe to toe
with humans on that on that particular accomplishment. Uh So,
(43:28):
when the environment changes, when the world changes in a
way that completely leaves humanity behind. These are gonna be
the rats are gonna be one of those species that
can that can actually thrive in this vastly new world.
And of course there's gonna they're gonna be some additional
mutations as well, that's right. Uh, they may be larger.
That's the idea that Zalaswitz was talking about. Here is
(43:53):
the time frame of this purported rat takeover would be
about three million to ten million years from now end,
based on previous rates of repopulation after mass extinctions, as
thought that the rat would grow much larger in size
um And again, you know, again this is a thought experiment,
but it makes a lot of sense when you look
(44:14):
at how wildly they are, and how they repopulate or
reproduce so quickly, and how clever and social they are. Yeah,
I mean, it's it's not that difficult to imagine a
future in which intelligent mutated rats are are running the
streets and there are no humans around. Now, will they
have mutated turtles in their midst as well? I don't know.
(44:38):
I leave that for the scientists to decide. I think
you're you are you excited about that notion? I am, because,
because of course, in teenage Ninja turtles. You have splinter
the intelligent rat, remember and uh, and of course that
leads to turtles, and then from there it just gets
It's it's crazy, but maybe that comic and TV shows
actually add blimps into our future, which just reminds us
all again that the little blip on the radar of
(45:00):
time that we all are all right on that count. Hey.
If you want to check out more episodes of this podcast,
um more blog post videos linkside our social media accounts,
you can do so by visiting stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. If you have thoughts about rats that
you want to share with us, or any other animals really,
particularly concerning empathy, please send us your thoughts at below
(45:23):
the mind at how stuff works dot com. For more
on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff
works dot com
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On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!