The Doomed Mouse Utopia That Inspired the 'Rats of NIMH'

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-doomed-mouse-utopia-that-inspired-the-rats-of-nimh

by tosh • 10 years ago

175 102 10 years ago

happycube• 10 years ago

. o O (Buzzfeed version of "The Secret of NIMH" - learn about this one new battery Energizer and Duracell don't want you to know!)

And more seriously, it's sad that people weren't interested in his attempts to fix it... which sound interesting even if they didn't work either.

throwanem2• 10 years ago

But the public held on hard to his earlier work—as Ramsden and Adams put it, "everyone want[ed] to hear the diagnosis, no one want[ed] to hear the cure."

Was there a "cure"? The article speaks of the fashion in which his later efforts attempted to alleviate the catastrophic social problems he'd observed in his earlier utopian designs. It is craftily silent on the subject of those efforts' results.

ubercore• 10 years ago

I took that as a veiled reference to population control, perhaps I'm reading into it, though.

vanderZwan• 10 years ago

Not sure if this is a cure, but it's an interesting story for comparison because it also involves some form of a mouse-utopia:

http://www.brucekalexander.com/articles-speeches/rat-park/14...

http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comics_en/rat-park/

scotchmi_st• 10 years ago

The article seems to me to hint that exploring inner space is the key here. Perhaps the internet, computer games and other ways of interacting socially without actually coming into contact with each other are a way for us to expand the amount of real estate we have to use and stave off the effects of overcrowding.

fragsworth• 10 years ago

That is shitty. We all want to know if there was a cure, and what it was, but the article doesn't tell us and claims "no one wanted to hear the cure".

ars• 10 years ago

"no one wanted to hear the cure"

I interpreted that as "no one wanted to fund [finding] the cure". And then he died, and that was the end of that.

zerocrates• 10 years ago

The paper they're citing mostly handwaves around the so-called "cure" as well, but that might really be for the best. It does have some more detail, though:

In his early experiments in the outdoor pens, Calhoun had witnessed a creative act by his rats that he likened to the discovery of the wheel by man: when building a new burrow they did not simply dig out the dirt as they went, as any normal rat would do, instead they packed it into a large ball which they then rolled out. This innovation had not come from the socially dominant animals but from a highly disorganized and predominantly homosexual group of subordinates, partially withdrawn from the larger social organization. As Calhoun saw it, the repression they had suffered at the hands of their superiors had resulted in deviant, creative, and thus adaptive behaviour. Inspired by this example, in his laboratory at NIMH, Calhoun attempted to design rodent universes that would both stimulate, resulting in “creative deviants,” and ameliorate: removing the worst excesses of crowding pathology.

Probably the most direct section is this:

Through a variety of methods, such as operant conditioning and determining which of the mice and rats could eat, sleep, live, with whom, he sought to design ever more intelligent and collaborative rodent communities, capable of withstanding ever greater degrees of density. Here, then, was the hopeful agenda: if the wrong environment would drive us to destruction, perhaps the correct environment would be our remedy.
Calhoun suggested organizing scientists into a global, intercommunicating network composed of independent but interconnected groups and sub-groups. Only then could the necessary conceptual growth to avoid a catastrophic sink be achieved. He claimed it was “toward a concern with science as a world system which must be understood if the human race is to survive.” He saw these attempts to defer social pathology as the centerpiece and real import of his work. Here was the profit, the positive signal from the noise of the behavioral sink.
It was in through this growth in conceptual space – enabled by the design of new buildings, new technologies, new social and intellectual networks – that humanity was presented with a more desirable future: what Calhoun called “Dawnsday” in opposition to von Foerster’s “Doomsday.” All of mankind might become part of a single “world brain,” consisting of numerous and diverse subsystems, each interlinked to, aware of, and dependent upon, the other.

http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/22514/1/2308Ramadams.pdf

projektir14• 10 years ago

As Calhoun saw it, the repression they had suffered at the hands of their superiors had resulted in deviant, creative, and thus adaptive behaviour.

Could it also be that the group was simply different, and suffered because it was different/non-dominant, but it was not the suffering that made them different to begin with? And getting away from the main group allowed them to do those things?

I would posit a utopia where there is such a thing as "dominant group" is not a utopia, after all.

Remember these guys? http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/13/science/no-time-for-bullie...

Groups of people interested in esoteric things who just want to be left alone... sounds familiar.

zyxley• 10 years ago

Calling it a "utopia" when there's limited space and nothing to do seems a bit inaccurate.

AstralStorm• 10 years ago

Rats and mice don't really do much except eating, breeding, hunting and socialising.

Mendenhall• 10 years ago

Interesting point but In its natural environment they do so much more. Search for the food, avoid weather, avoid predators etc. I think perhaps when those stresses are taken away it goes counter to their instincts and "wiring" causing problems.

dv_dt2• 10 years ago

Rats and mice don't really do much except eating, breeding, hunting and socialising.

At least one human based model of "what rodents need" is that. Perhaps it was more an experiment on crowding than utopian needs being met.

Edit: one, not our

lawpoop2• 10 years ago

This is untrue for rats: they are very curious, intelligent creatures and need intellectual "stimulation" such as areas to explore, toys to play with, etc.

tomcam• 10 years ago

What else is there?

uremog• 10 years ago

The initial population seemed to have plenty of space though. Eventually any growing population will run into a space limitation. It just happens sooner the smaller the space is.

projektir14• 10 years ago

Humans seem to breed a lot less in more developed countries, so I think that conclusion is questionable. I don't think it would be all that hard to freeze population growth in developed places.

frozenport• 10 years ago

That's the point

Eric_WVGG• 10 years ago

was just thinking about how much I despise the movie based on this book.

Possibly the best piece of children’s literature that is explicitly about evolution, neuroscience and society, and they turn it into a woo-woo adventure about a MAGIC AMULET

ugh. Read the book. Buy your kids the book. Terrific book.

cmiller1• 10 years ago

I agree that the book is much better than the movie, but I don't think the movie was terrible. I'd argue the movie was "dumbed down" to reach a wider range of ages. I liked the movie when I was 5, I liked the book when I was 11.

taeric4• 10 years ago

I have the audio book, but haven't listened to it yet. This just bumped it up to the top of my queue.

I felt the same way with Never Ending Story. And, as a kid, I loved that movie. Book was so much more, though.

Howl's Moving Castle was one where I actually had a hard time liking more than one or two scenes of the movie, because of how much I liked the book.

qwertyuiop9244• 10 years ago

Oddly, DWJ really liked the Howl's Moving Castle film, apparently.

As a Miyazaki/Ghibli fan, I got into the film more than the book.

I still need to read The Never Ending Story. But yeah, the movie of Rats of NIMH was super disappointing to me.

aidenn04• 10 years ago

I haven't seen the Howl's Moving Castle film, but I haven't liked any book by DWJ, including that one.

qwertyuiop9244• 10 years ago

Yep. I loved this book when I was a kid.

rootbear• 10 years ago

This. My sister used to read "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH" to her students and that's how I heard of it. We loved it and were furious at the film for completely inverting the author's message. In the book, Mrs. Frisbee is saved by Science (the rats) but in the film, she's saved by Magic. Yuck. The book, as I recall, also gets into the morality of giving the rats intelligence. I need to go back and read it again...

throwaway2016b2• 10 years ago

This paints a dark picture, not only for urban life, but for basic income. What wondrous creativity will be unlocked when we no longer need to work to survive? A negative amount, if you judge by the NEETs of today. Give a man food, shelter, and internet, and he'll kill himself for you.

projektir14• 10 years ago

It doesn't paint a picture because a limited and flawed experiment should not be used to make sweeping predictions about society at large.

This is precisely why, earlier, I was against calling the setting in this experiment a utopia. It's anything but. But call it that, convince people it's actually good conditions, and then other people will run to make unfounded claims that good conditions are bad. Not to mention that basic income is not going to magically create good conditions, anyway.

NEETs may be caused by poor life prospects, not the presence of food, shelter, and internet. I imagine you have access to those things, too, so do many other people who are not NEETs. People do not do well when they feel life is pointless, and many people do just as poorly as NEETs do but you don't see them or think about them because they don't make headlines.

throwaway2016b2• 10 years ago

Indeed it is a flawed utopia. Give them a planet to explore, problems to solve, predators to avoid, kin to protect, goals that must be met to survive...

NEETs may be caused by poor life prospects, not the presence of food, shelter, and internet.

I am intimately familiar with NEETs, having spent years interacting with them. The pattern I have noticed is of above average intelligence, many even brilliant, who would have thrived if the world had only given them a push, but left to their own devices commit slow, masturbatory suicides.

Some people can invent purpose from thin air. This is especially common amongst the kinds of elites and academics that most eloquently advocate basic income. But the vast majority of us cannot any more than a mouse. Most insidious is that even those for whom purpose is closest to grasp lose their drive. The artists lose the joy of painting and the programmers never begin their projects.

The true utopia is the harsh, cruel world of nature that provides purpose to every living thing.

drzaiusapelord• 10 years ago

Only because we don't take social currency as seriously as monetary currency. In a world where financial incentives don't matter, you'll have other incentives. We can see this in video games where people half-kill themselves to get some status or armor or whatever. Or how wealthy people take up charity work or compete on social status points like who holds the better parties or decorates the home better.

if you judge by the NEETs of today.

I think its pretty obvious that NEETs are very much in denial, or have no access to, the mental healthcare they need. We also need to accept that a lot of people on the autism spectrum will end up as NEET-like and there's probably nothing to be done about it.

M_Grey3• 10 years ago

Truly, "NEET" is a mental health issue in almost every case; when you look at it carefully it seems like a terrible way to live. Being utterly disconnected from your peers and potential social contacts is just not good for the human animal.

TeMPOraL3• 10 years ago

I would probably be a NEET (or barely E-human) if it wasn't for SSRIs, despite being a (I think) competent programmer who wrote code since being 13 years old. Medication lets me manage my disdain for what a typical human like me has to do to earn their bread - mostly pointless, mostly useless (or even socially harmful, hello ad world) stuff. I'm in tech, but I know some people who are close to being NEET and are on the more "artsy" side. I suspect some of that comes from lack of mental strength to handle the reality that you need to suck it up and waste 1/2 of your day, every day, doing stuff of dubious value, in order to stay a respectable (and fed) human being.

(In case you think this is just laziness, it's not - look at the hobby craft world. People can do a lot of hard, difficult work, as long as they have any say in what they do. It seems that a lot of people crave more autonomy now.)

That's why I'm hopeful about basic income idea - it seems like a way to give more autonomy to people who do not have the grit to fight for it on the job market. A way to channel this untapped productivity.

M_Grey3• 10 years ago

"...The blind forces of urbanization, flowing along the lines of least resistance, show no aptitude for creating an urban and industrial pattern that will be stable, self-sustaining, and self-renewing. On the contrary, as congestion thickens and expansion widens, both the urban and the rural landscape undergo defacement and degradation, while the unprofitable investments in the remedies…serve only to promote more of the blight and disorder they seek to palliate." (Mumford)

johnfjacobi4• 10 years ago

This article reminded me a lot of stuff written by Mumford, Jacques Ellul, and even Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber). Their stuff is worth reading.

Industrial Society and Its Future http://wildism.org/rca/items/show/13

Also Ellul's The Technological Society

c0achmcguirk• 10 years ago

It wasn't spelled out in the article, but in the movie NIMH is an acronym for National Institute of Mental Health.

ransom1538• 10 years ago

This seems more like a "prison". The effects mirror incarceration perfectly.

rglovejoy• 10 years ago

"Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization." - Agent Smith

projektir14• 10 years ago

Friendly reminder that this is a quote from a work of fiction. One that doesn't exactly have a lot of rigor in terms of the science/philosophy involved, really.

But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery.

Actually, nature had a patent on that one long before humans showed up. It's the author of that "primitive cerebrum", too. We've been spending the past however many thousands of years to try undo this reality. But we're really new to this party.

These AI's also sound awfully like humans. And they're motivated to create lots of humans (regardless of happiness of thereof) and collect them as batteries. Surely we should trust these ones to create a best world for us, and they have no reason to lie to us. I'm sure people resisted this in the Matrix because they disliked happy worlds. Not, you know, because having your entire reality be controlled by some other entity is worrying.

woodruffw2• 10 years ago

The Matrix borrows heavily from Plato's Allegory of the Cave [1], a very famous philosophical thought experiment.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave

fierycatnet• 10 years ago

It is a work of fiction but it's fairly dense. One of my philosophy classes used the first Matrix to explore some philosophical themes. It's been a while for concrete examples, one of the users pointed out Plato already. And this particular quote "human beings define their reality through suffering and misery." made me think of Dostoevsky's literature for some reason.

aidenn04• 10 years ago

Also the same character said that mammals (excluding humans) instinctively find a balance with their surroundings, which is laughable.

logfromblammo3• 10 years ago

Did you know that in the original version of the Matrix motion picture, humans were grown and plugged into the Matrix so that the AIs could use their brains for complex computation? I'm not sure why they changed the script to turn the people into rechargeable batteries instead of CPUs, but it was a really bad idea to do so.

So now I am imagining row after row of mice in little mouse chairs, wearing tiny VR helmets, organizing for a raid on the MegaMechaCat boss in the Mousecraft MMORPG.

It would be interesting to see if escapist recreation is necessary for a healthy high-density society. Purely for self-rationalization of my own gaming activity, you understand. Any scientific benefits would be purely accidental.

projektir14• 10 years ago

Did you know that in the original version of the Matrix motion picture, humans were grown and plugged into the Matrix so that the AIs could use their brains for complex computation?

That's really nifty, and there are a lot of interesting directions that could have gone it. But it would have driven it closer to more hard sci-fi, and I don't know how well that sells.

dragonwriter2• 10 years ago

Did you know that in the original version of the Matrix motion picture, humans were grown and plugged into the Matrix so that the AIs could use their brains for complex computation? I'm not sure why they changed the script to turn the people into rechargeable batteries instead of CPUs, but it was a really bad idea to do so.

They probably did it because test audiences (or maybe studio execs) didn't get the computation thing. If you watch the films, they really only changed it superficially to account for that, and lots of it only makes sense with the computation explanation, which even before I knew it was the original concept I assumed was the real thing going on, and that "batteries" was a faulty conclusion reached by the free humans.

fish55• 10 years ago

The revised script enabled many more resonances with social theory. A class relationship in which power is siphoned away from the masses...

rukuu001• 10 years ago

turn the people into rechargeable batteries

I remember watching that part & thinking hmmm, that's me at my job, except I'm generating money instead of energy.

jhallenworld• 10 years ago

Interesting, as soon as I saw the Matrix I thought that this idea which I knew from Dan Simmon's Hyperion would have made much more sense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_(Simmons_novel)

http://hyperioncantos.wikia.com/wiki/Cruciform

walter_bishop2• 10 years ago

I'm not sure why they changed the script to turn the people into rechargeable batteries instead of CPUs ..

You're only partly correct. The battery story was told to the humans to blind them from the truth, which would have been revealed to us in the sequels, except in between, the Wachowskis seem to have left planet earth. The question shouldn't be what is the Matrix, but what is its purpose.

The original matrix was created by the humans, but once the Architect became self aware he hijacked it for his own purpose. The Architects true purpose in creating the Matrix was to model a piece of reality and therefore by observing that, might discover the nature of the AI that created it.

In order for the experiment to succeed everyone except the Architect had to be blinded as to its true purpose. The previous Matrices were the result of failed experiments and so had to be destroyed. As such the Architect, the Oracle, Agent Smith, Neo and the humans were engaged in some kind of gargantuan scientific experiment. You would agree the above would have made more interesting sequels.

blfr• 10 years ago

Most of the adolescent mice retreated even further from societal expectations, spending all their time eating, drinking, sleeping and grooming, and refusing to fight or to even attempt to mate.

Every time I read about these experiments, this is the stirring part. Individuals that appear to be the most fit just fail to mate for no apparent reason, yet they live as if they were always preparing for it.

projektir14• 10 years ago

Well, "Individual organisms are best thought of as adaptation-executers rather than as fitness-maximizers" and all that.

appleiigs• 10 years ago

Yeah, I couldn't help but think about my nephew and nieces. No urge to get their driver's license, can't find things in the grocery store, not sure how much cash change they were supposed to get back...basic stuff. The video called those mice stupid.

ispolin• 10 years ago

Did anybody test the mice for physiological changes, and specifically reduced testosterone levels? In Matt Ridley's "The Red Queen", he mentions research about how low testosterone levels in both males and females cause this type of behavior.

Maybe there's an evolutionary adaptation that lowers testosterone production during times of high population, and in the artificial conditions of the experiment that adaptation exhibited itself too strongly?

That would also explain why mice taken out of the experimental environment didn't rehabilitate. There are other studies cited in "The Red Queen" that suggest that levels of testosterone are largely determined by the mother's environment and stress levels during gestation.

saulrh2• 10 years ago

Malthusian catastrophes are one of the things that happen to communities that aren't smart and coordinated enough to banish Moloch. Whoop-de-doo.

(http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/)

jeffdavis• 10 years ago

Does this count as a Malthusian catastrophe even though the food was ample?

saulrh2• 10 years ago

I suppose? Running out of physical space is almost as bad as running out of food, physically and psychologically speaking, unless you're very heavily adapted for it.

squidfood• 10 years ago

Space was a limiting resource; mice who were breeding were fighting neighbors for nests.

dredmorbius2• 10 years ago

Limiting factors are the things you don't have enough of.

If food isn't constraining, it's not your limiting factor, something else is.

The general idea is expressed in Leibig's Law of the Minimum, from Justiz Leibig, a 19th century botanist.

This is why counterarguments to Malthusian philosophy based on showing that some arbitrarily selected factor isn't constraining are moot. The question is, what is limiting in the environment. And if growth has stopped, something is constraining it.

sandworm1012• 10 years ago

These studies are naive in that they treat a species, mice, as a self-regulating unit. They aren't. No species exists absent other species. Mice have evolved alongside predators. Without predators, the external stimuli that has defined mice evolution, mice culture isn't sustainable.

This has direct application not only in dense populations but in our relationship with other species. Our bodies and our culture has evolved in the presence of rats, insects, dogs, cats and billions of bacterial and viruses. Isolation from these other species will doom us as it did these mice.

jhou2• 10 years ago

Of course. If in the experiment, they had simulated the effect of predators on the population and routinely culled the population to stay within some range, then probably the mice would have lived happily ever after generation after generation without any overcrowding and stressful effects. That entirely misses the point of the experiment.

Human beings in some societies are reaching the point where disease, fatal accidents, and similar stressful or population-reducing effects are minimized. For example, Silicon Valley. I'm not so sure though whether it is a utopia though. Physical living space, aka real estate, in SV is certainly at a premium.

And I've seen similar cases mirroring the study's "beautiful ones", the drinkers, and rowdy youths. There are parallels and insights to be drawn from these studies of mice and men.

sandworm1012• 10 years ago

I think it goes beyond population control. Simply removing the mice might not be enough. They have to see and fear the cat. Some have to be successful in avoiding the cat. They may develop behaviors and social order specifically to address the cat threat. Disappearing individuals randomly might have a radically unnatural impact.

With humans, it's also not as simple as population control. The presence of other species, even predators, is a cornerstone of our evolution and culture. We are afraid of the dark for a reason. We protect our kids from the unknown for a reason. We keep dogs as guards for a reason. A world truly without predators might result in very different culture. I'm often taken aback by how people who live in regions without large predators (UK, Japan) differ in their views on nature from those who walk beside predators every day (Canada/Australia).

Talk to a tourist on a beach about shark attacks. Then talk to a surfer. The former has strong opinions but isn't under any real threat. The later is often much more tolerant of sharks despite the increased risk (see Australia's shark cull debates). Even a slight but real risk of dangerous predators, imho, gives one a much greater respect for nature.

agumonkey• 10 years ago

No matter how grim the results are, I am amazed at the information. One tends to interact with other mammals in superficial ways. We see how sophisticated and not far from our own patterns they live.

ceautery• 10 years ago

The bleakest and most compelling statement I have ever read comes from the "Death Squared" paper mentioned in the article:

"For an animal so complex as man, there is no logical reason why a comparable sequence of events should not also lead to species extinction. If opportunities for role fulfillment fall far short of the demand by those capable of filling roles, and having expectancies to do so, only violence and disruption of social organization can follow. Individuals born under these circumstances will be so out of touch with reality as to be incapable even of alienation."

Scary insightful, but hopefully not prophetic.

henriquemaia• 10 years ago

Interesting quote. Makes you think about phenomenons like young people from the developed world, highly educated, joining violent groups like ISIS.

ChrisNorstrom• 10 years ago

I'm actually working for a group that's talking about this problem right now. Their site's not up yet (i'm working on it) but here's a sneak peak.

They've narrowed it down to Daniel Kristoff's theory of "Genetic Rot", according to the behaviors observed.

● evolution is not perfect, each generation has good genetic mutations and bad genetic mutations

● the bad genetic mututations normally die off and are weeded out of the gene pool

● fighting for resources causes natural eugenics and the betterment of a population by only the best get food and the weak dying off

● the mouse experiment basically shows how communism caused ALL mutations to continue to the next generation both good and bad.

● untill eventually an uncontrolled pattern of defective genes plagued the mice and could no longer be weeded out. This is why mice taken out of the experiment did not recover.

● resource abundance caused individual mice who never should have reproduced to reproduce introducing their defect genes into the gene pool. (most animals get a huge decrease in population after a huge increase due to over-abundance of resources)

● the mice reproduced to a point until every single mouse had bad genes and could no longer save the population

● The mouse experiment mirrors what's happening in our society right now

Also, keep in mind this is a very sanitized version of the experiment. Somewhere out there is a complete list of behaviors observed, I can't find it but altasobscura doesn't talk about the controversial findings like "gender roles broke down" and "there was an increase of homosexuality" of the mice. Basically hinting that homosexuality, gender roles, and instinct are all heavily genetic based. And bad genes can often invert or flip instinct.

The Doomed Mouse Utopia That Inspired the 'Rats of NIMH'

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