rats learn behavior from across the world

[gib65]

I'm reading a book called "Beyond ADD" by Thom Hartmann. In the chapter "Morphic Resonance: The Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon", he talks about a phenomenon called "remote shared learning" which involves animals learning behavior from other animals whom they have no physical contact with whatsoever. Rats are trained to perform a task in America, and rats in Scotland end up learning to perform the same task with fewer trials than it took those in America. Rats in Australia also end up showing this "remote learning".

 

Here's the passage:

 

This may sound absurd at first' date=' and even Pavlov, when confronted with it, assumed it was a sort of genetic transmission of learned behavior. He trained a group of rats to run to a particular feeding place whenever he rang a bell. The first generation of rats he trained took an average of 300 tries before they learned always to run to the feeding place when Pavlov rang the bell. Their offspring, however, learned how to find the food when the bell was rung after only 100 tries. The children of this second generation got it after thirty tries, and their children learned how to find the food after only ten tries. None were given an opportunity to learn this behavior from their parents, and the results of this study boggled the mind of Pavlov. He died, however, before he was able to follow it up.

 

But it was followed up, with startling results. From 1920 to 1950, one of the longest studies in the history of behavioral science was conducted at Harvard (and, later, other institutions) by Dr. William McDougal. He put together a test for rats: they were dropped into a darkened tank of cold water from which there were two exit ramps. One ramp was lighted, but gave the rats an electric shock when they tried to use it. The other exit was dark and hard to find, but provided safe escape from the cold water.

 

Using standard white laboratory rats, McDougal found that the first generation of rats he tested took over 165 tries to master this test. By the time he got to the thirtieth generation, however, the rats easily mastered the test in fewer than 20 tries. When he first published the results of this test, it of course raised skepticism. The idea that behavior might be inherited was odd, to say the least, and more disturbing, might have enlightening or chilling implications if applied to humans.

 

So biologist F.A.E. Crew tried to replicate McDougal's Harvard experiment in faraway Edinburgh, Scotland. Using the same standard laboratory rats, but ones that had no relation to McDougal's (still in Boston), he found that on the first try his rats could learn the water test with only 25 tries.

 

The results of this stimulated biologist W.E. Agar in Melbourne, Australia, to try the test out with his rats. He found that the first generation also learned the test in about 25 tries, and as he continued training rats through subsequent generations, he was able to get this down considerably by the fiftieth generation, over twenty years.

 

What Agar did that was different from Crew or McDougal, however, was that he kept another group of rats breeding in a separate room, unrelated to the test rats, for the same fifty generations without ever giving them any tests or training. When he finally tested his control group, he discovered, to his and everybody else's shock and amazement, that they too learned the maze with a speed identical to offspring of the tested and trained group.

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What do you think? Is this science or pseudo-science? How could this be explained?

[alan2here]

Maybe they were comuinicating bewteen the rooms with sqeeks.

 

I don't find it particually suprising that lurining a particular skill is inherited.

 

It seems far more unlikely that they where telipathicly communicating with each other.

[Mokele]

I'd need to see a lot more details of the methods. If even 1% of the rats in the shock-pool experiment perished, there would be a major selective force for increased learning rate. Hell, even if they didn't perish, there could be selection, since females who took less time to find the ramp spent less energy swimming and can thus spend more energy on their offspring.

 

That a control group did better than the experimental group first did is also meaningless, since that could be purely by chance; that can only be solved by multiple experimental and multiple controls.

 

Without much more detailed accounts of the methods, it's impossible to say anything.

 

Mokele

[Bluenoise]

Most likely the guy doing the experiments is just getting better at training rats through practice, or he's getting better at identifying corrent behavoir.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundredth_Monkey

[gib65]

Yeah, those are good points. But what about the implications of the last three paragraphs? That's what I really find bizaar. According to Hartmann, the rats in Scotland and Australia learnt to swim to the hidden ramp with way fewer trials that the rats in America. Appearantly, the experimenter was a completely different person, the rats had no contact with those in America, and they were not genetically related at all.

 

On the other hand, Hartmann believes a lot of strange things. He has a radio show in which he promulgates conspiracy theories vis-a-vis Bush and the election.

 

I can never know for sure. To me, studies like these are always "so someone says".