experiment with rats in water

Drowning Rats Psychology Experiment: Resilience and the Power of Hope

In the 1950s, Curt Richter, a professor at Johns Hopkins, did a famous drowning rats psychology experiment. This experiment, though cruel, demonstrated the power of hope and resilience in overcoming difficult situations. Summary by The World of Work Project

A Psychology Experiment: Drowning Rats

In a series of experiments that are fairly cruel and unpalatable, yet interesting in their findings, Curt Richter demonstrated that hope is a powerful factor in perseverance. In our view, this is also closely linked with resilience .

The Drowning Rats Psychology Experiments

Curt’s experiments focused on how long it takes rats to die from drowning. He conducted his experiments by placing rats into buckets filled with water and seeing how long they survived. He introduced a range of variables into the experiment, that yielded some interested results.

Domesticated Rats

12 domesticated rats were used in Curt’s first set of experiments. The first of these rats initially swam around the surface, then dove to the bottom of the bucket and explored what was there for a while. It lasted a total of two minutes before it drowned.

Two of the other domesticated rats did roughly the same thing, and survived for roughly the same period of time.

The other nine domesticated rats though did something completely different. After an initial exploration, the predominantly spent their time and the surface. And the just kept swimming. They survived for literally days before eventually succumbing to exhaustion and drowning.

The second set of experiments Curt undertook involved 34 wild rats. Wild rats are excellent swimmers, and these savage and aggressive ones had only recently been caught. Obviously, Curt expected them to fight hard for their survival.

Surprisingly though, this wasn’t the case at all. Despite their ferocity, fitness and swimming ability, not one of the 34 wild rats survived more than a few minutes.

The Role of Hope

Curt reflected on what caused some of the rats to give up and decided that hope a key factor in the willingness to struggle on. Where rats have perhaps been helped in the past and have hope of being saved, they will keep fighting in the believe that all is not lost. However, when they don’t have this prior experience, they will give up quickly.

In his own words he said: “ The situation of these rats scarcely seems one demanding fight or flight — it is rather one of hopelessness… the rats are in a situation against which they have no defense… they seem literally to ‘give up.’ ”

With this in mind, Curt decided to experiment further.

Introducing Hope and Support

The last set of experiments that we’ll focus on were concerned with the impact that introducing hope would have on the perseverance of the rats in buckets. In these experiments Curt’s hypothesis was roughly that introducing hope to rats would increase their survival times.

To test his hypothesis Curt selected a new cohort of rats who were all similar to each other. Again, he introduced them into buckets and observed them as they progressed towards drowning. This time though, he noted the moment at which they gave up then, just before they died, he rescued them. He saved them, held them for a while and helped them recover.

He then placed them back into the buckets and started the experiments all over again. And he discovered that his hypothesis was right. When the rats were placed back into the water they swam and swam, for much longer than they had the first time they were placed in the buckets. The only thing that had changed was that they had been saved before, so had hope this time.

Curt wrote that “ the rats quickly learn that the situation is not actually hopeless ” and that “ after elimination of hopelessness the rats do not die .”

What This May Mean For People

Humans and rats are very different beings, but there is still a belief that we can learn a lot from these experiments. Where individuals have hope, they have higher levels of perseverance. They will keep fighting when they feel these is a chance of success or rescue. When they don’t have hope, they won’t.

A range of other experiments have also supported this.

What This Means in the World of Work

From a work perspective, these findings can be taken to mean that people will remain resilient and will continue to persevere in the face of difficult situations, provided they have hope.

So, if they are rescued from time to time. If they are supported. If they believe the future will be a better place and if they feel others are there to help them, they may be able to drive themselves through difficult situations. The importance of belief here is similar to the importance of belief in the expectancy theory of motivation .

What this means for leaders is that people in your team will be strong and resilient, provided that you give them hope of a better future. If that hope is extinguished, your people will stop fighting for you.

Some Specific Quotes from Richter

“The situation of these rats scarcely seems one demanding fight or flight—it is rather one of hopelessness; whether they are restrained in the hand or confined in the swimming jar, the rats are in a situation against which they have no defense. This reaction of hopelessness is shown by some wild rats very soon after being grasped in the hand and prevented from moving; they seem literally to ‘give up’. Support for the assumption that the sudden death phenomenon depends largely on emotional reactions to restraint or immersion comes from the observation that after elimination of the hopelessness the rats do not die. This is achieved by repeatedly holding the rats briefly and then freeing them, and by immersing them in water for a few minutes on several occasions. In this way the rats quickly learn that the situation is not actually hopeless; thereafter they again become aggressive, try to escape, and show no signs of giving up. Wild rats so conditioned swim just as long as domestic rats or longer.” You can find these comments on p196 of this pdf .

Learning More

Our resilience can be an important factor in our Wellbeing in the workplace. It’s a bit of a difficult concept to pin down, but we can get a sense of how resilient we are with the Brief Resilience Scale .

There are steps we can take to improve our own wellbeing . Improving our self-awareness might also help us improve our wellbeing. Similarly, learning about different types of stress and how to manage stress can be helpful. The below podcast covers the concept of stress-buckets, which might of interest.

The World of Work Project View

These drowning rats psychology experiments are clearly abhorrent, as is most animal testing. We know that the findings of many experiments do not translate to humans. In fact, experiments of this nature are still being used by several organizations. This should stop. A good starting point for finding out which organizations still use this form of testing so that you can avoid their products is this article by PETA .

Though these experiments should no longer take place, we shouldn’t ignore what people have already discovered from them in the past. The findings from these experiments are interesting. The fact that hope leads to greater resilience comes as little surprise to us, though of course findings in rats may not translate to other species. That said, we think this is probably the case in humans as well as rats.

In fact, we believe that a large part of the role of leadership is to help individuals feel valued, respected, supported and hopeful about their futures. In doing this, individuals can have better qualities of working life, and organizations can have higher levels of productivity.

That said, we think these experiments and the lessons that can be learned from them are also very sinister. It’s clearly the case that providing people with hope, real or false, inspires them to greater effort. We are certain that many organizations and HR functions know this, and look to build this into their management approaches.

Where hope is real, it’s good. Where it’s falsely introduced to drive individuals to higher levels of perseverance in poor working situations, then it’s quite reprehensible. Which doesn’t mean it’s not profitable or that it doesn’t happen. It just means that people should not work for these organizations where they have any choice.

Interestingly, the relationship between hope and faith has been discussed many times throughout history. A good place to listen to some reflections on this is in this episode of the BBC podcast “In Our Time”.

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We’re also considering creating a community for people interested in improving the world of work. If you’d like to be part of it, please contact us .

Sources and Feedback

Schulkin, Jay, and Paul Rozin. Curt Richter: A Life in the Laboratory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005., doi:10.1353/book.60340. https://www.aipro.info/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/phenomena_sudden_death.pdf

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Drowning Rats – The Hope Experiment: Dr. Curt Richter’s Harvard Rat Study

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Have you ever been in a situation where you felt dejected and hopeless?

When you approached someone to share your feelings, did you receive the impractical solution of “Don’t give up, have hope”? Well, Dr. Curt Richter’s Harvard Rat Study may just prove the power of hope to you.

Table of Contents

The Drowning Rats Experiment

Richter, an American psycho-biologist, conducted an experiment to assess the behavior of ‘drowning rats’ and how long it took them to die. While his procedure may sound cruel by today’s ethical experimentation standards, the findings that he derived from it are incredibly interesting.

The experiment involved observing the rats’ behavior when they were immersed in buckets filled with water. Richter varied different factors to come to his conclusions about the role of ‘hope’ in perseverance.

Experiment I: Domestic Rats

The first step of the experiment involved observing 12 domesticated drowning rats. A quarter of these rats began by floating around the surface of the water for some time and then plunging inside the bucket to understand the interior of the bucket. This entire process took place for two minutes following which they drowned.

However, the other nine rats displayed dissimilar behavior. They explored the bucket in its entirety and then kept swimming to stay afloat in the bucket. After days of survival, they eventually succumbed, probably due to fatigue and drowning.

Experiment II: Wild Rats

The next phase of this Harvard rat swimming experiment took place with freshly caught wild and The next phase of experiment took place with freshly caught wild and aggressive rats. Trained by the forces of nature, these 34 rats could swim very well, thus forming the hypothesis that these wild drowning rats would strive for their life. To Richter’s surprise, this was not the case. In fact, all of these untamed drowning rats died within a few minutes. Skills that they had derived from their worldly savvy were all in vain.

Hope: The Key to Perseverance

After assessing the huge difference between the reaction of the domesticated and the wild rats, Dr. Richter felt that since the domesticated drowning rats have experienced the presence of a support system (in contrast with the wild ones), they are hopeful and thus can put in the best of their efforts to save their lives. 

He expressed:

“ The situation of these rats scarcely seems one demanding fight or flight — it is rather one of hopelessness… the rats are in a situation against which they have no defense… they seem literally to ‘give up. ”

To elaborate on his findings, he further changed some settings in the experiment.

The Hope Experiment

He wanted to find out the relationship between hope and perseverance in the drowning rats. As per his earlier statement, he hypothesized that hopefulness would make the rats fight for their survival more actively. So, he began this phase of his experiment by leaving homogeneous rats in buckets filled with water. However, when the rats drowned and were on the verge of dying, they were saved by the experimenter. They were laid down on towels, dried off and made steady.

Once the rats had recovered, they were put under the previous circumstances again. This time, it was noticed that the drowning rats would swim on and on. The duration for which they could survive surpassed the earlier time lengths.

Conclusion of the Experiment

In the last condition, the only variable that had changed was that the drowning rats had been saved. Thus, they were made aware of the feeling of hope. Since they swam for a longer time, therefore, Richter’s hypothesis stood true, he thus established that “ after elimination of hopelessness the rats do not die ”.

Even though rats and humans are very different animals, these tiny creatures give us an important lesson. They teach us that when we are hopeful about the outcomes of a situation, our perseverance and willingness to put in effort are also more. So, if we don’t have hope, we can reach a position where we would not attempt to save our lives. You should always try to find inspiration to improve your perseverance .

It was rightly said by Samuel Johnson that “The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure but from hope to hope”.

To understand more about yourself and your mind, begin your journey of hope with the Evolve App now. Download the app and start your free trial.

Karishma Golchha is pursuing Bachelor’s in Psychology. She is very keen about the human mind and looks forward to connect with you at [email protected] and evolve together!

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Learn Something Interesting

Education for the pure joy of learning, the harvard university hope experiment.

During the 1950’s, Dr. Curt Richter from Harvard University performed a series of experiments using water, buckets, and both domesticated and wild rats which resulted in a surprising discovery within the field of psychology. In the first experiment, Richter placed his test subjects into large buckets half filled with water with even those rats which were considered above average swimmers, giving up and dying within a few short minutes. In the second experiment, Richter pulled each rat out just as it was about to give up due to exhaustion and let them rest for a few moments. Upon inserting the rats back into the bucket of water, Richter found that the rats continued to struggle to survive for up to 60 hours as the rats now believed that if they continued to push forward with enough effort put forth, eventually they would be rescued once again. Richter recorded in his notes, “after elimination of hopelessness, the rats do not die”

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Curt Richter's rat hope experiment: Why did the first nine rats survive for days?

I can understand the part that the experimenter saved the rat just before it was about to die and then the rat lasted longer for the next drowning. But I do not understand what it means that before such intervention, when he first tried drowning, first 3 rats died in 2 minutes but the remaining 9 rats survived for days.Was it just a random chance that the first 3 rats happened to have little hope and the remaining 9 rats had naturally more hopes?

The first rat, Richter noted, swam around excitedly on the surface for a very short time, then dove to the bottom, where it began to swim around, nosing its way along the glass wall. It died two minutes later. Two more of the 12 domesticated rats died in much the same way. But, interestingly, the nine remaining rats did not succumb nearly so readily; they swam for days before they eventually gave up and died. ..... Richter then tweaked the experiment: He took other, similar rats and put them in the jar. Just before they were expected to die, however, he picked them up

https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/kidding-ourselves/201405/the-remarkable-power-hope

• experimental-psychology
• animal-cognition

• $\begingroup$ The first experiment used domesticated rats so they were used to having someone take care of them. The ones that survived so long probably had more confidence that someone would come. $\endgroup$ –  Just Weighinin Commented Mar 29 at 12:09

2 Answers 2

For more information on the experiment, there is Swamy (2020) :

The conclusion drawn was that since the rats BELIEVED that they would eventually be rescued, they could push their bodies way past what they previously thought impossible.

and the source ( Richter, 1957 ) can be downloaded in PDF

I had to re-read the Richter paper a couple of times to digest it, and from my understanding, the differences in swimming time was in the same (first) experiment. The tweak to the experiment was where, instead of using domesticated rats, they used hybrid rats ("crosses between domesticated and wild rats").

Richter, C. P. (1957). On the phenomenon of sudden death in animals and man. Psychosomatic Medicine, 19 , 191–198. https://doi.org/10.1097/00006842-195705000-00004

Swamy, S. (2020). The Power of Hope: A Rat Experiment by Dr Curt Richter. LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/power-hope-rat-experiment-dr-curt-richter-santosh-swamy

• 3 $\begingroup$ But the time that the experimenter introduced "hope" by rescuing rats was AFTER the first batch of 12 rats had died, wasn't it? I mean, the liked article says "Richter then tweaked the experiment". Did I misunderstand it and the experimenter introduced "hope" between the third and fourth rat? $\endgroup$ –  Damn Vegetables Commented Feb 12, 2022 at 15:29

It's not clear what caused this. This variation in swimming times is in fact what motivates Richter to continue tweaking his experiment:

The significance of this average curve was greatly reduced by the marked variations in individual swimming times. At all temperatures, a small number of rats died within 5 - 10 minutes after immersion, while in some instances others apparently no more healthy, swam as long as 81 hours. The elimination of these large variations presented a real problem, which for some time we could not solve. Then the solution came from an unexpected source - the finding of the phenomenon of sudden death, which constitutes the main topic of this communication.

The numbers you cite regarding the 3 versus 9 rats comes from his second run of the experiment where he tests whether trimming the whiskers in the rats would result in different times.

The first rat swam around excitedly on the surface for a very short time, then dove to the bottom, where it began to swim around nosing its way along the glass wall. Without coming to the surface a single time, it died 2 minutes after entering the tank. Two more of the twelve domesticated rats tested died in much the same way; however, the remaining 9 swam 40 to 60 hours.

It seems that it was just caused by random luck.

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Wolfington: the power of hope.

This article was first printed in the Vail Daily on March 20, 2020. During times of substantial adversity and stress, it seems flippant and almost irresponsible to say, “stay positive.” However, for decades research has linked positive thinking with enhanced medical outcomes, psychological well-being, and relationship satisfaction. Over the past two weeks, our community has faced substantial challenges. There have been historic closings for schools, restaurants, hotels, and businesses. There have been public health orders that impact our ability to connect and convene with our friends and support systems. There is financial uncertainty for individuals, families, and businesses throughout our community. There is fear. However, within all of this uncertainty, there is also hope. Hope is an incredibly powerful and often overlooked psychological force. During the 1950s, Curt Richter, a Denver native, Harvard Graduate and scientist with John Hopkins University, conducted a profound (and by today’s standards incredibly cruel) experiment on rats. Dr. Richter placed rats into buckets of water and timed their ability to swim. Rats, who are apparently known for their strong swimming skills, lasted an average of 15 minutes before drowning. In a second experiment, Richter rescued the rats when he saw them begin to stop swimming and sink. When he took them out, he dried them off and gave them a short period of rest (I like to picture him doing this with a mini, yet plush, rat-size towel). And then, just as they were dry and rested, Richter put them back into the water. However, this time Richter identified a substantial behavioral change. The rescued rats swam longer than 15 minutes. In fact, they swam for nearly 60 hours. Psychologists often cite this article as evidence of the power of hope. Our perspective can be incredibly powerful. When we are hopeful that our circumstances are temporary and change is possible, we can achieve extraordinary feats. Hope can be the factor that changes an outcome. Stay hopeful, Eagle County. Dr. Casey Wolfington is a licensed psychologist and the community behavioral health director with Eagle Valley Behavioral Health, an outreach of Vail Health. For information on therapy and support services available in our community, please visit  https://www.eaglevalleybh.org . Scholarships and financial assistance are available for behavioral health services through EVBH.  

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This Old Experiment With Mice Led to Bleak Predictions for Humanity’s Future

From the 1950s to the 1970s, researcher John Calhoun gave rodents unlimited food and studied their behavior in overcrowded conditions

Maris Fessenden ; Updated by Rudy Molinek

What does utopia look like for mice and rats? According to a researcher who did most of his work in the 1950s through 1970s, it might include limitless food, multiple levels and secluded little condos. These were all part of John Calhoun’s experiments to study the effects of population density on behavior. But what looked like rodent paradises at first quickly spiraled into out-of-control overcrowding, eventual population collapse and seemingly sinister behavior patterns.

In other words, the mice were not nice.

Working with rats between 1958 and 1962, and with mice from 1968 to 1972, Calhoun set up experimental rodent enclosures at the National Institute of Mental Health’s Laboratory of Psychology. He hoped to learn more about how humans might behave in a crowded future. His first 24 attempts ended early due to constraints on laboratory space. But his 25th attempt at a utopian habitat, which began in 1968, would become a landmark psychological study. According to Gizmodo ’s Esther Inglis-Arkell, Calhoun’s “Universe 25” started when the researcher dropped four female and four male mice into the enclosure.

By the 560th day, the population peaked with over 2,200 individuals scurrying around, waiting for food and sometimes erupting into open brawls. These mice spent most of their time in the presence of hundreds of other mice. When they became adults, those mice that managed to produce offspring were so stressed out that parenting became an afterthought.

“Few females carried pregnancies to term, and the ones that did seemed to simply forget about their babies,” wrote Inglis-Arkell in 2015. “They’d move half their litter away from danger and forget the rest. Sometimes they’d drop and abandon a baby while they were carrying it.”

A select group of mice, which Calhoun called “the beautiful ones,” secluded themselves in protected places with a guard posted at the entry. They didn’t seek out mates or fight with other mice, wrote Will Wiles in Cabinet magazine in 2011, “they just ate, slept and groomed, wrapped in narcissistic introspection.”

Eventually, several factors combined to doom the experiment. The beautiful ones’ chaste behavior lowered the birth rate. Meanwhile, out in the overcrowded common areas, the few remaining parents’ neglect increased infant mortality. These factors sent the mice society over a demographic cliff. Just over a month after population peaked, around day 600, according to Distillations magazine ’s Sam Kean, no baby mice were surviving more than a few days. The society plummeted toward extinction as the remaining adult mice were just “hiding like hermits or grooming all day” before dying out, writes Kean.

Calhoun launched his experiments with the intent of translating his findings to human behavior. Ideas of a dangerously overcrowded human population were popularized by Thomas Malthus at the end of the 18th century with his book An Essay on the Principle of Population . Malthus theorized that populations would expand far faster than food production, leading to poverty and societal decline. Then, in 1968, the same year Calhoun set his ill-fated utopia in motion, Stanford University entomologist Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb . The book sparked widespread fears of an overcrowded and dystopic imminent future, beginning with the line, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over.”

Ehrlich suggested that the impending collapse mirrored the conditions Calhoun would find in his experiments. The cause, wrote Charles C. Mann for Smithsonian magazine in 2018, would be “too many people, packed into too-tight spaces, taking too much from the earth. Unless humanity cut down its numbers—soon—all of us would face ‘mass starvation’ on ‘a dying planet.’”

Calhoun’s experiments were interpreted at the time as evidence of what could happen in an overpopulated world. The unusual behaviors he observed—such as open violence, a lack of interest in sex and poor pup-rearing—he dubbed “behavioral sinks.”

After Calhoun wrote about his findings in a 1962 issue of Scientific American , that term caught on in popular culture, according to a paper published in the Journal of Social History . The work tapped into the era’s feeling of dread that crowded urban areas heralded the risk of moral decay.

Events like the murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964—in which false reports claimed 37 witnesses stood by and did nothing as Genovese was stabbed repeatedly—only served to intensify the worry. Despite the misinformation, media discussed the case widely as emblematic of rampant urban moral decay. A host of science fiction works—films like Soylent Green , comics like 2000 AD —played on Calhoun’s ideas and those of his contemporaries . For example, Soylent Green ’s vision of a dystopic future was set in a world maligned by pollution, poverty and overpopulation.

Now, interpretations of Calhoun’s work have changed. Inglis-Arkell explains that the main problem of the habitats he created wasn’t really a lack of space. Rather, it seems likely that Universe 25’s design enabled aggressive mice to stake out prime territory and guard the pens for a limited number of mice, leading to overcrowding in the rest of the world.

However we interpret Calhoun’s experiments, though, we can take comfort in the fact that humans are not rodents. Follow-up experiments by other researchers, which looked at human subjects, found that crowded conditions didn’t necessarily lead to negative outcomes like stress, aggression or discomfort.

“Rats may suffer from crowding,” medical historian Edmund Ramsden told the NIH Record ’s Carla Garnett in 2008, “human beings can cope.”

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Maris Fessenden is a freelance science writer and artist who appreciates small things and wide open spaces.

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The Doomed Mouse Utopia That Inspired the ‘Rats of NIMH’

Dr. john bumpass calhoun spent the ’60s and ’70s playing god to thousands of rodents..

On July 9th, 1968, eight white mice were placed into a strange box at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland . Maybe “box” isn’t the right word for it; the space was more like a room, known as Universe 25, about the size of a small storage unit. The mice themselves were bright and healthy, hand-picked from the institute’s breeding stock. They were given the run of the place, which had everything they might need: food, water, climate control, hundreds of nesting boxes to choose from, and a lush floor of shredded paper and ground corn cob.

This is a far cry from a wild mouse’s life—no cats, no traps, no long winters. It’s even better than your average lab mouse’s, which is constantly interrupted by white-coated humans with scalpels or syringes. The residents of Universe 25 were mostly left alone, save for one man who would peer at them from above, and his team of similarly interested assistants. They must have thought they were the luckiest mice in the world. They couldn’t have known the truth: that within a few years, they and their descendants would all be dead.

The man who played mouse-God and came up with this doomed universe was named John Bumpass Calhoun. As Edmund Ramsden and Jon Adams detail in a paper, “ Escaping the Laboratory: The Rodent Experiments of John B. Calhoun & Their Cultural Influence ,” Calhoun spent his childhood traipsing around Tennessee , chasing toads, collecting turtles, and banding birds. These adventures eventually led him to a doctorate in biology, and then a job in Baltimore , where he was tasked with studying the habits of Norway rats, one of the city’s chief pests.

In 1947, to keep a close eye on his charges, Calhoun constructed a quarter-acre “rat city” behind his house, and filled it with breeding pairs. He expected to be able to house 5,000 rats there, but over the two years he observed the city, the population never exceeded 150. At that point, the rats became too stressed to reproduce. They started acting weirdly, rolling dirt into balls rather than digging normal tunnels. They hissed and fought.

This fascinated Calhoun—if the rats had everything they needed, what was keeping them from overrunning his little city, just as they had all of Baltimore?

Intrigued, Calhoun built another, slightly bigger rat metropolis—this time in a barn, with ramps connecting several different rooms. Then he built another and another, hopping between patrons that supported his research, and framing his work in terms of population: How many individuals could a rodent city hold without losing its collective mind? By 1954, he was working under the auspices of the National Institute of Mental Health, which gave him whole rooms to build his rodentopias. Some of these featured rats, while others focused on mice instead. Like a rodent real estate developer, he incorporated ever-better amenities: climbable walls, food hoppers that could serve two dozen customers at once, lodging he described as “walk-up one-room apartments.” Video records of his experiments show Calhoun with a pleased smile and a pipe in his mouth, color-coded mice scurrying over his boots.

Still, at a certain point, each of these paradises collapsed. “There could be no escape from the behavioral consequences of rising population density,” Calhoun wrote in an early paper . Even Universe 25—the biggest, best mousetopia of all, built after a quarter century of research—failed to break this pattern. In late October, the first litter of mouse pups was born. After that, the population doubled every two months—20 mice, then 40, then 80. The babies grew up and had babies of their own. Families became dynasties, carving out and holding down the best in-cage real estate. By August of 1969, the population numbered 620.

Then, as always, things took a turn. Such rapid growth put too much pressure on the mouse way of life. As new generations reached adulthood, many couldn’t find mates, or places in the social order—the mouse equivalent of a spouse and a job. Spinster females retreated to high-up nesting boxes, where they lived alone, far from the family neighborhoods. Washed-up males gathered in the center of the Universe, near the food, where they fretted, languished, and attacked each other. Meanwhile, overextended mouse moms and dads began moving nests constantly to avoid their unsavory neighbors. They also took their stress out on their babies, kicking them out of the nest too early, or even losing them during moves.

Population growth slowed way down again. 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. (These individuals were forever changed—when Calhoun’s colleague attempted to transplant some of them to more normal situations, they didn’t remember how to do anything.) In May of 1970, just under 2 years into the study, the last baby was born, and the population entered a swan dive of perpetual senescence. It’s unclear exactly when the last resident of Universe 25 perished, but it was probably sometime in 1973.

Paradise couldn’t even last half a decade.

In 1973, Calhoun published his Universe 25 research as “Death Squared: The Explosive Growth and Demise of a Mouse Population.” It is, to put it lightly, an intense academic reading experience. He quotes liberally from the Book of Revelation, italicizing certain words for emphasis (e.g. “to kill with the sword and with famine and with pestilence and by wild beasts ”). He gave his claimed discoveries catchy names—the mice who forgot how to mate were “the beautiful ones”’ rats who crowded around water bottles were “social drinkers”; the overall societal breakdown was the “behavioral sink.” In other words, it was exactly the kind of diction you’d expect from someone who spent his entire life perfecting the art of the mouse dystopia.

Most frightening are the parallels he draws between rodent and human society. “I shall largely speak of mice,” he begins, “but my thoughts are on man.” Both species, he explains, are vulnerable to two types of death—that of the spirit and that of the body. Even though he had removed physical threats, doing so had forced the residents of Universe 25 into a spiritually unhealthy situation, full of crowding, overstimulation, and contact with various mouse strangers. To a society experiencing the rapid growth of cities—and reacting, in various ways, quite poorly — this story seemed familiar. Senators brought it up in meetings. It showed up in science fiction and comic books. Even Tom Wolfe, never lost for description, used Calhounian terms to describe New York City, calling all of Gotham a “behavioral sink.”

Convinced that he had found a real problem, Calhoun quickly began using his mouse models to try and fix it. If mice and humans weren’t afforded enough physical space, he thought, perhaps they could make up for it with conceptual space—creativity, artistry, and the type of community not built around social hierarchies. His later Universes were designed to be spiritually as well as physically utopic, with rodent interactions carefully controlled to maximize happiness (he was particularly fascinated by some early rats who had created an innovative form of tunneling, where they rolled dirt into balls). He extrapolated this, too, to human concerns, becoming an early supporter of environmental design and H.G. Wells’s hypothetical “World Brain,” an international information network that was a clear precursor to the internet.

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.” Gradually, Calhoun lost attention, standing, and funding. In 1986, he was forced to retire from the National Institute of Mental Health. Nine years later, he died.

But there was one person who paid attention to his more optimistic experiments, a writer named Robert C. O’Brien. In the late ’60s, O’Brien allegedly visited Calhoun’s lab , met the man trying to build a true and creative rodent paradise, and took note of the Frisbee on the door, the scientists’ own attempt “to help when things got too stressful,” as Calhoun put it. Soon after, O’Brien wrote Ms. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH —a story about rats who, having escaped from a lab full of blundering humans, attempt to build their own utopia. Next time, maybe we should put the rats in charge.

Naturecultures is a weekly column that explores the changing relationships between humanity and wilder things. Have something you want covered (or uncovered)? Send tips to [email protected] .

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Swimming Rats and the Power of Hope

A few weeks ago, I learned about a(n infamous) study done back in 1957 by Dr. Curt Richter. In it, he and his team did experiments on rats. They found that if the water temperature wasn’t too hot or too cold, domesticated Norwegian rats were able to swim around 40-60 hours on average. But when they put wild Norwegian rats into the exact same situation, they would would die within 15 minutes. They were the same breed of rat; the only difference was one group was domesticated and the other was not.

The disparity of results for the two groups was significant, and so they tried to track down what may have contributed to it. In further experiments, they found that if they put the wild rats into the water, and then pulled them out after a few minutes — and then repeated this a few times before the final testing —  the rats would end up lasting about the same length of time as the domesticated group when the final test was run.

Why did these few additional immersions in the water increase the endurance of these rats from 15 minutes to dozens of hours? The team postulated that the deaths were more psychological than physiological; that the real issue was one of hopelessness.

The wild rats were not used to being confined, so as soon as they were thrown into this new environment, one which seemed impossible to escape, they simply gave up. But if they had already been exposed to this same environment, and had then been removed, they knew that there was a chance the researchers could take them out of the water at any moment. It was no longer entirely hopeless, and they ended up lasting way longer than they would otherwise.

Putting the ethics of the study aside for a moment, these findings highlight the role hope can play in our lives. Being in a state of hopelessness can strip us of our energy and motivation to continue. But finding hope can provide the strength to endure far longer than we may have expected.

Difficult times are, by definition, difficult. But they’re nothing compared to the weight of hopelessness. Which means that giving the gift of hope to someone who needs it may be one of the most valuable gifts we could ever give.

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Universe 25: The Mouse "Utopia" Experiment That Turned Into An Apocalypse

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The utopia in all its glory. Image credit: Yoichi R Okamoto, White House photographer (public domain, via Wikimedia Commons ).

Over the last few hundred years, the human population of Earth has seen an increase, taking us from an estimated one billion in 1804 to seven billion in 2017. Throughout this time, concerns have been raised that our numbers may outgrow our ability to produce food, leading to widespread famine. 

Some –  the Malthusians  – even took the view that as resources ran out, the population would "control" itself through mass deaths until a sustainable population was reached. As it happens, advances in farming, changes in farming practices, and new farming technology have given us enough food to feed  10 billion people , and it's how the food is distributed which has caused mass famines and starvation. As we use our resources and the climate crisis worsens, this could all change  – but for now, we have always been able to produce more food than we need, even if we have lacked the will or ability to distribute it to those that need it.

But while everyone was worried about a lack of resources, one behavioral researcher in the 1970s sought to answer a different question: what happens to society if all our appetites are catered for, and all our needs are met? The answer – according to his study – was an awful lot of cannibalism shortly followed by an apocalypse.

John B Calhoun set about creating a series of experiments that would essentially cater to every need of rodents, and then track the effect on the population over time. The most infamous of the experiments was named, quite dramatically, Universe 25 .

In this study, he took four breeding pairs of mice and placed them inside a "utopia". The environment was designed to eliminate problems that would lead to mortality in the wild. They could access limitless food via 16 food hoppers, accessed via tunnels, which would feed up to 25 mice at a time, as well as water bottles just above. Nesting material was provided. The weather was kept at 68°F (20°C), which for those of you who aren't mice is the perfect mouse temperature. The mice were chosen for their health, obtained from the National Institutes of Health breeding colony. Extreme precautions were taken to stop any disease from entering the universe.

As well as this, no predators were present in the utopia, which sort of stands to reason. It's not often something is described as a "utopia, but also there were lions there picking us all off one by one". 

The experiment began, and as you'd expect, the mice used the time that would usually be wasted in foraging for food and shelter for having excessive amounts of sexual intercourse. About every 55 days, the population doubled as the mice filled the most desirable space within the pen, where access to the food tunnels was of ease.

When the population hit 620, that slowed to doubling around every 145 days, as the mouse society began to hit problems. The mice split off into groups, and those that could not find a role in these groups found themselves with nowhere to go.

"In the normal course of events in a natural ecological setting somewhat more young survive to maturity than are necessary to replace their dying or senescent established associates," Calhoun wrote in 1972 . "The excess that find no social niches emigrate."

Here, the "excess" could not emigrate, for there was nowhere else to go. The mice that found themself with no social role to fill – there are only so many head mouse roles, and the utopia was in no need of a Ratatouille -esque chef – became isolated.

"Males who failed withdrew physically and psychologically; they became very inactive and aggregated in large pools near the center of the floor of the universe. From this point on they no longer initiated interaction with their established associates, nor did their behavior elicit attack by territorial males," read the paper. "Even so, they became characterized by many wounds and much scar tissue as a result of attacks by other withdrawn males."

The withdrawn males would not respond during attacks, lying there immobile. Later on, they would attack others in the same pattern. The female counterparts of these isolated males withdrew as well. Some mice spent their days preening themselves, shunning mating, and never engaging in fighting. Due to this they had excellent fur coats, and were dubbed, somewhat disconcertingly, the "beautiful ones".

The breakdown of usual mouse behavior wasn't just limited to the outsiders. The "alpha male" mice became extremely aggressive, attacking others with no motivation or gain for themselves, and regularly raped both males and females . Violent encounters sometimes ended in mouse-on-mouse cannibalism.

Despite – or perhaps because – their every need was being catered for, mothers would abandon their young or merely just forget about them entirely, leaving them to fend for themselves. The mother mice also became aggressive towards trespassers to their nests, with males that would normally fill this role banished to other parts of the utopia. This aggression spilled over, and the mothers would regularly kill their young. Infant mortality in some territories of the utopia reached 90 percent.

This was all during the first phase of the downfall of the "utopia". In the phase Calhoun termed the "second death", whatever young mice survived the attacks from their mothers and others would grow up around these unusual mouse behaviors. As a result, they never learned usual mice behaviors and many showed little or no interest in mating, preferring to eat and preen themselves, alone.

The population peaked at 2,200 – short of the actual 3,000-mouse capacity of the "universe" – and from there came the decline. Many of the mice weren't interested in breeding and retired to the upper decks of the enclosure, while the others formed into violent gangs below, which would regularly attack and cannibalize other groups as well as their own. The low birth rate and high infant mortality combined with the violence, and soon the entire colony was extinct . During the mousepocalypse, food remained ample, and their every need completely met.

Calhoun termed what he saw as the cause of the collapse "behavioral sink".

"For an animal so simple as a mouse, the most complex behaviors involve the interrelated set of courtship, maternal care, territorial defence and hierarchical intragroup and intergroup social organization," he concluded in his study.

"When behaviors related to these functions fail to mature, there is no development of social organization and no reproduction. As in the case of my study reported above, all members of the population will age and eventually die. The species will die out."

He believed that the mouse experiment may also apply to humans, and warned of a day where – god forbid – all our needs are met.

"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 fulfilment 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."

At the time, the experiment and conclusion became quite popular, resonating with people's feelings about overcrowding in urban areas leading to "moral decay"  (though of course, this ignores so many factors such as poverty and prejudice).

However, in recent times, people have questioned whether the experiment could really be applied so simply to humans – and whether it really showed what we believed it did in the first place.

The end of the mouse utopia could have arisen "not from density, but from excessive social interaction," medical historian Edmund Ramsden said in 2008 . “Not all of Calhoun’s rats had gone berserk. Those who managed to control space led relatively normal lives.”

As well as this, the experiment design has been criticized for creating not an overpopulation problem, but rather a scenario where the more aggressive mice were able to control the territory and isolate everyone else. Much like with food production in the real world, it's possible that the problem wasn't of adequate resources, but how those resources are controlled.

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HOPE Floats!

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“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you  HOPE  and a future.” Jeremiah 29:11 NIV (emphasis added)

Back in the 1950’s, Curt Richter, a well-known Harvard graduate and scientist with Johns Hopkins University did a series of rather unorthodox experiments using water, buckets and rats that resulted in an amazing discovery. He wanted to see how long rats could swim before they drowned. Cringe-worthy no doubt! So you ask “What’s so amazing about knowing how long it takes for a rat to drown?” Bear with me for a bit longer…

Richter put rats into large buckets, half-filled with circulating water. Being notoriously good swimmers – the rats lasted about 15 minutes before giving up and succumbing to the depths of the bucket. Not impressed – I wasn’t either. All I was thinking was “Poor rat!” Richter must have read my mind.

In a follow-up experiment, as the rats started to give up and sink, he pulled the drowning rodents to safety, dried them off, gave them a brief period of rest only to put them right back into that same bucket. Here comes the amazing part – those same rats now swam for an average of 60 hours – YEP – that’s six with a zero or two and a half days .

A rat that was temporarily saved survived 240 times longer than one that was not given any intervention.

Richter’s conclusion: that saving a rat from drowning – even temporarily, gave that rat hope .

More often than not – clients come through your doors on any given day emotionally, spiritually and sometimes even physically “drowning”. They’re trying to just tread water as their life seemingly swirls around them, feeling as if they are getting pulled under at every turn. What these hurting women and men need is an infusion of hope. And that’s exactly what you do – when you answer the phone with a cheerful voice, when your clients are made to feel welcome by a friendly receptionist, when your Client Advocate radiates the Love of Christ so they treat clients as honored guests and not unwelcome, bothersome interruptions. You are essentially taking them out of the swirling waters of their lives, drying them off, providing your clients an opportunity to rest and give them an infusion of hope.

And that’s just what Heartbeat International wants you, as our treasured affiliates to experience as well. We understand that there will be times in your respective ministries that you will feel like you’re “drowning”. When those moments arise – and they will – we want you to know that help is just a phone call or email away. We are here for you with an encouraging word. We are available to listen and advise on an ongoing issue. Heartbeat consultants are available to provide affordable training seminars for staff, board and/or volunteers of pregnancy help organizations.

Also, Heartbeat International’s Pregnancy Help Conference provides a time to “dry off and rest”, offering that infusion of hope and strength to continue on in your mission. Heartbeat is here to encourage, empower and educate so you have the tools and resources that act as “life-preservers” enabling you to keep “swimming” until you reach the shore or at the very least, are in a place where your feet touch bottom (something those poor rats didn’t have).

Put it all together and add in the opportunity to network with fellow workers, you have the assurance that you are not swimming alone.

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WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today awarded 19 Rapid Turnaround Experiment (RTE) user access projects to help advance accident tolerant fuels, inform reactor fuel designs, and perform research to sustain the nation’s current light-water reactor fleet. The awardees will have nine months to complete the experiments using the world-class testing capabilities provided through the Department’s Nuclear Science User Facilities (NSUF) at no cost to the researchers. 

Rapid Turnaround Experiment awards facilitate the advancement of nuclear science and technology by providing nuclear energy researchers timely access to testing, computing, and technical expertise. 

The selected RTE project research teams include 19 principal investigators (PI) from eight universities and industry, as well as one international PI with a U.S. national laboratory co-PI, who will work with the NSUF on their proposed experiments. The competitively selected projects encompass a range of nuclear fuels and materials research that will apply advanced experimental and computational methods. Key materials being studied include various types of alloys, composite materials, fuels, and sensors that could be promising candidate materials for use in advanced nuclear reactors. 

View a complete list of all 19 NSUF selections HERE . 

The research capabilities provided to complete this work are equal to approximately $1 million in support. 

The NSUF advances the Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy’s mission through a consortium of state-of-the-art irradiation and post-irradiation testing facilities that can be utilized in support of nuclear energy research and development. Each facility brings exceptional capabilities and expert mentors to the projects. 

This is the third and final round of fiscal year 2024 RTE awards. The first RTE call for proposals in fiscal year 2025 is anticipated to open on Tuesday, October 1, 2024, and close Thursday, October 31, 2024.   

Learn more about current and past RTE awards . 

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Cage Studies: How Environment Shapes Drinking Habits

What caged animals can teach you about overcoming excessive drinking..

Posted July 29, 2023 | Reviewed by Ray Parker

• What Is Addiction?
• Find a therapist to overcome addiction
• Cage studies show how environment shapes drinking habits.
• In the "cocaine rats" experiment, scientists fed lab rats in cages with drug-laced water.
• In a later study, lab rats in "rat paradise" drank less drug-laced water than those in cages.

Have you heard the story about the lab rats who got hooked on cocaine, neglected everything else, and eventually starved themselves to death?

This chilling story is called “cocaine rats.” They were the test subjects in a series of experiments conducted in the 1950s and 60s. Scientists fed these lab rats with drug-laced water in order to gain more understanding of addictive behavior. The result was horrifying. The lab rats soon became addicted, started to consume drugs compulsively, and many ended up starving themselves to death.

A 30-second video was created based on these experiments to educate the public about the dangers of addiction : “Addiction can kill you, just like it killed these rats!”

The educational video was perhaps well-intended, but it also inadvertently demonized addiction. As a problem drinker who struggled with alcohol for over a decade, I felt doomed when I first came across the video.

Questions I was too afraid to entertain: "Is my alcohol addiction any different from a drug addiction?" and “Can I ever break free from my excessive drinking, or is my fate sealed like the rat in the video?”

From Metal Cage to Rat Paradise

Like many other people, I didn’t know until recently that there was a second part to the “cocaine rat” story. Another set of experiments in the 70s called “rat park” offered a completely different picture of addiction, and perhaps a way out of it.

It all started with a Canadian psychologist named Bruce Alexander, who noticed that something was off with the original experiments. Alexander realized that the lab rats in the previous experiment were all confined in a metal cage, with no alternative comfort or entertainment except the drug-laced water.

He wondered whether the result would be any different if the setup was different. Alexander and his colleagues decided to duplicate these experiments. Except this time, instead of creating a living hell, they built a rat paradise.

New lab rats were placed in a park that contained everything a rat could wish for—delicious treats, toys to play with, space to run, and other rat companionships. Of course, there was also drug-laced water.

The result was strikingly different. This time, the rats did not turn into hungry, drug-seeking creatures like their imprisoned counterparts did. Most of them soon lost interest in the drug-filled water after trying it and showed a strong preference for other activities.

Why did these two groups of rats act so differently in the face of an addictive substance? Was the cocaine in the rat park diluted? Or were the lab rats in the rat park genetically different from the ones in the cage? The answer is neither.

The only difference lies in the environment , more specifically, the amount of rewarding experiences that are available in the environment.

It’s Not the Drug, It’s the Cage

Animals, rats or humans alike, need a minimal level of rewarding experiences to be well-regulated. When the minimal level is unmet, one experiences distress and dysregulation. In a sense, each of us has a reward bucket that we need to fill up every day.

Things that allow us to fill up this bucket include, relationships and connections, movements that restore rhythms in our body, activities that are aligned with our values and beliefs, and things that give us pleasure, such as food, drugs, alcohol, or other addictive behaviors. For the residents in the rat park, their reward buckets are filled with play time, exercise, and companionship. While the prisoners in the metal cage have nothing to choose from but drug-laced water.

The contrasting difference in resources does not only exist between the metal cage and the rat paradise. Human worlds are not built equal either. How a person can fill their reward bucket is limited by what they have.

When a person is born into a loving, supportive family, grows up in a safe, connected community, and is offered resources to pursue their interests or passion, they can easily fill their reward bucket with a variety of activities. On the other hand, there are many who are less fortunate, lacking access to any of the resources mentioned above.

A child who is born into a dysfunctional family, with emotionally unavailable parents, lives in an unsafe neighborhood, or barely has enough resources to meet his basic needs, will struggle to keep his reward bucket full. The void must be filled one way or another.

When human connection, safety, comfort, or meaningful goals are absent, food, alcohol, and drugs become the next best thing. For people with substance use disorder, alcohol was the replacement they found.

The imprisoned rat returned to the cocaine-laced water over and over again because it was the best thing they had access to. It’s not the addictive substance, nor the one who uses it that caused addiction, it's the cage.

You Have the Power to Transform the Cage

To adapt to the confined cage, the rats learned to compulsively consume drug-laced water; to adapt to an environment of lacking, a person learned to turn to alcohol for comfort and relief.

However, there is a crucial difference between humans and imprisoned rats. Your environment may offer an explanation for your past, but it does not have to define your future.

You have the power to change your environment—not overnight, but over time. By transforming the cage, you will eventually create a life where you don’t have to rely on addiction to fill your reward bucket.

Accumulating rewarding experiences can be a learned skill. It starts with making a commitment to expand your horizons on the activities that bring joy and meaning to your life, whether it’s through fostering new relationships, engaging in activities that align with your values, or intentionally caring for your body and mind.

If you have been relying on alcohol to fill your reward bucket for a long time, you may have gotten rusty with these skills. Or perhaps you never had a chance to learn them while growing up. That’s okay. It’s never too late to start to learn.

Starting today, allow yourself to ask the question: “How can I bring some more joy into my life with a non-drinking activity tonight?” If you are unsure about where to start, check out some of my favorite tools, including pairing a 3-minute drinking diary with delayed drinking activities. To learn more, visit my website .

Jeanette Hu, AMFT , based in California, is a former daily drinker, psychotherapist, and Sober Curiosity Guide. She supports individuals who long for a better relationship with alcohol, helping them learn to drink less without living less.

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Therapeutic effect of boron neutron capture therapy on boronophenylalanine administration via cerebrospinal fluid circulation in glioma rat models.

1. Introduction

2. materials and methods, 2.1. c6 glioma model orthotopic rats, 2.2. bnct effect on the csf administration method of 10 bpa, 2.3. pre- and post-treatment mri assessment, 2.4. hematoxylin and eosin staining of c6 rat glioma brain sections, 2.5. boron concentrations in various normal tissues of rat heads administered bpa via both the csf and iv methods, 2.6. statistics.

Click here to enlarge figure

4. Discussion

4.1. why does bpa accumulate in brain tumors despite small doses of csf, 4.2. boron concentration in normal tissues and the t/n ratio in bnct, 4.3. bpa pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics in brain tissue, 5. conclusions, author contributions, institutional review board statement, informed consent statement, data availability statement, acknowledgments, conflicts of interest.

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Share and Cite

Kusaka, S.; Voulgaris, N.; Onishi, K.; Ueda, J.; Saito, S.; Tamaki, S.; Murata, I.; Takata, T.; Suzuki, M. Therapeutic Effect of Boron Neutron Capture Therapy on Boronophenylalanine Administration via Cerebrospinal Fluid Circulation in Glioma Rat Models. Cells 2024 , 13 , 1610. https://doi.org/10.3390/cells13191610

Kusaka S, Voulgaris N, Onishi K, Ueda J, Saito S, Tamaki S, Murata I, Takata T, Suzuki M. Therapeutic Effect of Boron Neutron Capture Therapy on Boronophenylalanine Administration via Cerebrospinal Fluid Circulation in Glioma Rat Models. Cells . 2024; 13(19):1610. https://doi.org/10.3390/cells13191610

Kusaka, Sachie, Nikolaos Voulgaris, Kazuki Onishi, Junpei Ueda, Shigeyoshi Saito, Shingo Tamaki, Isao Murata, Takushi Takata, and Minoru Suzuki. 2024. "Therapeutic Effect of Boron Neutron Capture Therapy on Boronophenylalanine Administration via Cerebrospinal Fluid Circulation in Glioma Rat Models" Cells 13, no. 19: 1610. https://doi.org/10.3390/cells13191610

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