Respect the Rat

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. 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 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, 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, 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

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 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 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 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,

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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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,

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,

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

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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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. 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 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, 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 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. 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. 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. 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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

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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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. 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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

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

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. 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 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 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

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. 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 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, 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 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.

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

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

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, 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, 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

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 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 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 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

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, 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 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 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

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, 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. 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, 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 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, 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

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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 the mind at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com