Rat Race Research Paper
Noteworthy psychological experiments of the 20th century
Elizabeth E Galvan
Renton High School
Rat Race
B.F Skinner is widely known for his infamous animal experiments of rewards, reinforcement, and behavior. With his experiment, “Rat Race”, his purpose was to successfully learn how to teach organisms to behave in a desired manner. He planned to do so by isolating his rats and numerous other subjects in a box away from the outside world. He would gradually increase, decrease, or manipulate their reward so that over time, they would understand and carry out the behaviors they had been taught, without retaliation. In the end, his method proved successful. Not only that, but Skinner discovered that organisms actually learn better when …show more content…
rewarded rather than punished. Once his work became public, it received mixed reactions. There were rumors spread about a dark side to Skinner, and people began to believe he went as far as to trap his own daughter inside of a box. Others, such as Lauren Slater, actually found that his methods could be adapted to significantly aid everyday life, including the caring of children. I agree with her. His experimenting can very well be substantial in the proper teaching and raising of children, showing them right from wrong in an efficient manner, and was perfectly ethical considering that he did not torture the subjects he used like most had thought at the time. The definition of “ethical” is whether or not something is morally right, in which I see no problem with Skinner’s experiment. He did no harm, therefore he count have been wrong in his actions.
Obedience to Authority
With the holocaust at an end, a common inquiry arose among societies.
Just how was it that Hitler was able to get so many people to do his dirty work for him, killing thousands of Jews on command? Why is it that we obey or disobey authority? This essentially was Stanley Milgram’s purpose for his experiment of obedience to authority.
He began with a simple ad in the paper offering an amount of money in exchange for participating in the experiment. The volunteers would arrive at a set address, get paid, then taken into a room, one at a time, with the supposed “experimenter” and another supposed participant, both of which were but mere actors.
The volunteers were told that the experiment was based off an interest in the effect of punishment on learning. The actor participant was strapped to an electric chair playing the role of learner while the volunteer administered shocks to them each time they made a mistake in a set of word pairs read to …show more content…
them.
The results found that even when the volunteers did not approve of what they were being told to do, 65% still followed through with administering the shocks simply because the experimenter and the setting looked convincing enough to be true. Thus, it was proven that obedience to authority is not based off of individual personality but situation.
Milgram’s experiment was controversial. Several claimed their experience had opened them up to new perspectives, others felt their minds had been wrongly tampered with. Yet either way, in my eyes, he was just. No one was physically harmed, and mentally, I don’t see the experiment to have been horribly traumatizing. Besides, Milgram’s findings can now be applied in the military and police force, making certain that our troops and officers are following orders at all times, saving as many lives as they can, and extensively increasing our overall protection.
Psychiatric Diagnosis
When we visit a psychiatrist, we automatically assume what most assume, that the doctors know their stuff and that we’ve come to a reliable resource. However, David Rosenhan made the decision to test that belief. Maybe psychiatry isn’t as dependable as it is made out to be.
Rosenhan recruited eight others, and together, they faked their way into several mental institutions saying they were hearing the word “Thud”, and once inside, they behaved absolutely ordinarily, no longer hearing the word.
Rosenhan’s purpose was to observe whether the psychiatrists would take note of their sanity or be overly influenced by the premises.
Ultimately, he revealed numerous flaws with the system. Even though his fake patients were absolutely rational, their psychiatrists gave them the same treatment as truly insane patients. It was found that diagnosis was not based upon the patient, but the context, and what the doctor is willing to believe.
Psychiatric facilities across the country were outraged by Rosenhan’s findings. So angered in fact, that they later accused him of sending more false patients to their institutions, when in fact, he had sent none, only further revealing the unreliability of their services. Though the psychiatry field would most definitely disagree, Rosenhan’s actions were principled and significant. Had he not gone through with his experiment, thousands of dollars would continue to be thrown out the window. And at what cause? No patient would ever be properly diagnosed, nor would they ever be discharged for the correct reasoning. His experiment can be applied to any psychiatric facility at any given period to see whether or not they truly know what they are doing.
Diffusion of Responsibility
At this point, I’ve already explored the fine points behind obedience to authority with the help of Stanley Milgram’s experimentation. But John Darley and Bibb Latané on the other hand, were curious about just the opposite, “What happens when a group crisis takes place, and there is no specialist to step in and handle the situation?”
Together, Darley and Latené set out to recreate such a scenario. The pair placed a college student in a solitary room, making them believe that there were students in other rooms by situating tape recorders inside of them. The trick, was to have one of the recorders play what sounded like someone experiencing a seizure.
The results presented that 31% of the students involved reacted to the seizing student when it appeared others were in the vicinity as well. Yet when alone, a whopping 85% attempted to offer support to the troubled individual.
Being exposed to their experiment for the first time, I found myself becoming more self-aware. The numbers are frightening, to think that help would not be given to those who obviously needed it, simply because they happened to have a larger audience. It’s contradictory to what I had thought to be true in the past, and it made me more willing to make a greater effort to become more selfless overall. So I think it’s overwhelmingly important that Darley and Latané conducted their experiment. Obviously there was no moral wrong to what they did. And now that their results have been put out there, people will become more self-aware like I did, and we will be prepared. The next time a crisis takes place, the public will know to take action the second someone is in need of help. So many more lives will be saved because of Darley and Latané.
Quieting the Mind
Cognitive dissonance. The phrase was first devised by Leon Festinger in his 1957 book, “When Prophecy Fails”. The phrase ultimately translates to a discomfort experienced when two or more beliefs conflict with one another. Within his lifetime, Festinger conducted quite a few trials on the matter, trying to see what changes occur when expectations do not meet reality.
One such experiment revolved around students, half of which were paid a dollar to tell a lie while the other half was given twenty dollars to tell the same. What he found was those who had lied for the dollar were more apt to advocate afterwards that the lie was genuinely true where as those who lied for twenty dollars were more likely to straight up tell the truth. These results supported his theory that in order to decrease dissonance we are willing to alter our beliefs in order to better support our behaviors. It would be excruciating to accept the fact that you lied for only a dollar, and so, you feel the need to make certain that the lie is made to seem true so that you do not have to face that embarrassment, thus eliminating dissonance.
I remember hearing the world was going to end on December 21, 2012. I thought it was pretty unwise when some actually sold their belongings as if they really were going to perish. I couldn’t fathom why they would still defend themselves after nothing ensued. Those who didn’t make drastic changes to their lifestyle were just fine accepting the apocalypse never came. But the select few who gave up everything, continued on, altering their belief to things like, “Well, the end didn’t come in December, but it will happen soon.” Learning about cognitive dissonance has helped me see precisely why they said what they said. It’s all a matter of human need to relieve the frustration brought up by the conflictions amid our behaviors and beliefs. Festinger’s simple experiment was far from immoral, but aside being insightful and intriguing, I don’t see how it can be applied to aid in day to day life just yet.
Harry Harlow’s Primates
Nowadays, it would be hard for anyone to believe, but there was indeed a time when scientists thought that love was only based on a sheer need for nourishment and foodstuff. And for some reason, the majority of the science field would only address love as, “proximity.” It was this that instigated psychologist Harry Harlow’s purpose, to discover the true source of love.
Harlow studied this by separating infant monkeys from their mothers and isolating them with non-milk producing mother figures covered in soft cloth towels.
Subsequently, the infants quickly became attached to the mother’s gentle surface.
In an attempt to rule out popular scientific belief, he also isolated a group of newborn monkeys with a rigid wired mother that only dispensed milk.
Harlow then realized that the baby monkeys were still tremendously attached emotionally to the cloth surrogate mothers, granting they would approach the wire surrogates whenever they were famished. The monkeys favored the soft surrogate mothers who were unable to feed them over the metal surrogates that could provide food.
Built on these outcomes, Harlow determined that touch is the basis of the establishment of love.
In my opinion, the experiments executed on the newborn monkeys certainly pushed forward the field of psychology. Because of his work, we now have more reason to raise our offspring in a certain manner. We know to play with our children, to teach them to walk and play, and to caress them in order for them to love us and grow up to be ideal adults. However, the torturing of the monkeys was cruel, unethical, and Harlow’s work enraged animal rights activists everywhere. It all just makes me speculate what Henry Harlow was like as a person and how he must have grown up to even contemplate executing what he did.
Rat Park
It’s been an ongoing topic for years, whether or not marijuana should be legalized. This is because, like all other drugs, marijuana is addictive and can lead to several tribulations, right? Nonetheless, Bruce Alexander thought different. Alexander believed that there is nothing enslaving about drugs, and that even recurrent disclosure to tantalizing drugs does not end in countless problems like society has come to believe, and he wanted to prove it.
In rat experiments, sedatives were confirmed to be addictive. However, Alexander debated that this was only because the rats would undergo excessive pain in order to pull the drugs up through a straw, that the rodents became dependent as a result of the settings they were contained in. He alleged that if they were left in an environment which was comfortable and blissful, the rats wouldn’t acknowledge the drugs.
Thus, he created "Rat Park", with enough room and sanitary water, it was the perfect habitat for a rat.
First, he had a group of un-addicted rats inhabit the space while both a supply of drugs and water were provided. Then, he placed a group of pre-addicted rats inside with both substances available once again. He discovered that in this ideal environment, the rodents chose not to consume the narcotics, even though they may have been addicted beforehand. With his work, Bruce Alexander demonstrated that drug addiction occurs most often in distressing situations, but, if we are content, addiction will cease to be a predicament.
Rats normally aren’t animals people defend and love, so I think it’s safe to say his experiment was moral and if any of Alexander’s rats suffered from the narcotics, it probably wasn’t worth putting against him. And in terms of significance, although this is certainly great news, I just don’t see how we could possibly achieve total happiness for everyone to be safe from addiction. Unlike “Rat Park”, we live in a perfectly imperfect world outside of our control.
The False Memory
Experiment
This experiment was performed by none other than Elizabeth Loftus, and ultimately furthered her studies of human recollection and imagination. She stated that people frequently mistake their imagination for actual memories, and that long term remembrance can be incredibly insubstantial, influenced effortlessly. Keeping this in mind, she came to believe many individuals in child abuse litigations were being incorrectly condemned on the grounds that evidence derived from childhood memories could be as easy to manipulate as the hair on our heads.
Loftus intended to ascertain this with her experiment titled, “Lost in the Mall”, in which the participants were given a book of their childhood memories in addition to a false memory about being lost in a mall when they were younger. The family of the participants contributed as well, urging that the memory had happened. The results showed a great portion of the subjects actually believed they had been lost in a mall and subsequently formulated narratives on how they got lost in the first place. Loftus revealed that we don’t simply make up stories to support ourselves in a bind, but that we have a human need to fill in the white spaces we come across within our minds. “Lost in the Mall” explained perfectly why it is that people so easily doubt their memories when challenged. We start to question ourselves, and before we know it, we’re believing whatever was told to us. This is significant because it proved that memory isn’t as reliable as it seems, thus showing the judicial system that they needed to find a different method to obtain accurate evidence, not just in child abuse cases, but any case. As a result, evidence coming in would be more likely to be reliable, lessening the chances that a person would be wrongfully convicted. As an added bonus, her experiment was moral. She cooperated with the families of her test subjects and made sure not to step over any boundaries, beforehand, which I think was a just thing to do.
Memory Inc.
Akin to Loftus, scientist Eric Kandel also had an interest in memory. However, he had a different purpose. Kandel wanted to answer the question, “How does the brain convert short-term memory to long-term memory?”
He looked into this by testing slugs. Kandel began by coring the aplysia and putting two of its conserved neurons in broth. From there, he maneuvered the neurons so they could communicate with one another and the first neuron would form synaptic connections with the second. Kandel then showed that by hindering a small molecule in nerve cell 1, a molecule by the name of CREB, he could disrupt the transmissions.
At last, he discovered that if CREB is blocked, and the communications between neurons are brought to a standstill, this is what prevents short term memories from becoming long term. Thus, CREB is the answer to Kandel’s initial question.
In his case, sea slugs were the perfect candidate for studying the communication of brain neurons. Yes they were living, breathing creatures, but how is experimenting on slugs any different from fish, rats, or frogs? How is it any less moral? I thin whoever stands up against his type of animal testing needs to pause and think for a moment. If we are not fit to go through experimentation on ourselves, if we are not able to experiment on any organisms even slightly similar to ourselves, how will science advance? How will the human race be able to adapt? Scientists must experiment, and if it has to be on living organisms, then so be it. It is the right thing to do, to save humanity in the long run. By knowing about CREB, we now know how to make certain that short term memory in an individual can still remain, even after their short term memory is hindered. Memories can be saved by converting them to long term recollections, and it is because of Kandel and his aplysia.
Radical Mind Cures
Chances are that at one point in your life, you’ve met someone ambitious, determined, and perhaps hungry for greatness. Yet at the same time, these folks can be passionate about aiding in the lives of their fellow peoples. Antonio Egas Moniz was one of those people. For the longest time, he lived with a dying urge to imprint his name upon the field of neurology. But it wasn’t until he heard of Becky, a female primate who, through brain surgery, was ridden of her ever anger issues, that Moniz found his true initiative. He wanted to show the world that man’s fretful states could also be cured by surgical means.
Moniz carried out his test on a woman he had come to know as Mrs.M. With her scalp shaved and swabbed, he had two pen point-sized holes drilled on both sides of her skull, in which Moniz and his assistant Lima injected an alcohol-filled syringe to securely extinguish the nerve tissue. Initially, five hours later, Moniz observed some minor cognitive decline in the patient, but this was normal to see just after surgery. The real results came later. Mrs. M was perfectly normal. She was calm, and her anxiety was nonexistent. Post treatment, her anxiety disappeared promptly along with a decline in paranoid thoughts. Many criticize and detest Moniz for his lobotomies, specifically for fixating his experimenting only on live humans rather than animals. Nonetheless, he did earn himself a noble peace prize. I think those who say what he did was unethical aren’t looking at the big picture. Like Mrs. M, none of his patients were forced into his trials, they volunteered, and therefore, it was just fine for him to carry out his procedures. The impact of his work outweighs the risks. Those who went through the tests really had nowhere else to go. Their states were so extensive that it was holding them back. Moniz’s experiment was pretty much their final hope. What’s more, when his surgeries succeeded, people got to live anew, no longer needing to deal with the mental tribulations they dealt with in the past. Moniz gave life to people who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to experience it to its fullest.
Bibliography
Slater, L. (2004). Opening Skinner 's box: great psychological experiments of the twentieth century. New York: W.W. Norton.
Elizabeth E Galvan
Renton High School
Rat Race
B.F Skinner is widely known for his infamous animal experiments of rewards, reinforcement, and behavior. With his experiment, “Rat Race”, his purpose was to successfully learn how to teach organisms to behave in a desired manner. He planned to do so by isolating his rats and numerous other subjects in a box away from the outside world. He would gradually increase, decrease, or manipulate their reward so that over time, they would understand and carry out the behaviors they had been taught, without retaliation. In the end, his method proved successful. Not only that, but Skinner discovered that organisms actually learn better when …show more content…
rewarded rather than punished. Once his work became public, it received mixed reactions. There were rumors spread about a dark side to Skinner, and people began to believe he went as far as to trap his own daughter inside of a box. Others, such as Lauren Slater, actually found that his methods could be adapted to significantly aid everyday life, including the caring of children. I agree with her. His experimenting can very well be substantial in the proper teaching and raising of children, showing them right from wrong in an efficient manner, and was perfectly ethical considering that he did not torture the subjects he used like most had thought at the time. The definition of “ethical” is whether or not something is morally right, in which I see no problem with Skinner’s experiment. He did no harm, therefore he count have been wrong in his actions.
Obedience to Authority
With the holocaust at an end, a common inquiry arose among societies.
Just how was it that Hitler was able to get so many people to do his dirty work for him, killing thousands of Jews on command? Why is it that we obey or disobey authority? This essentially was Stanley Milgram’s purpose for his experiment of obedience to authority.
He began with a simple ad in the paper offering an amount of money in exchange for participating in the experiment. The volunteers would arrive at a set address, get paid, then taken into a room, one at a time, with the supposed “experimenter” and another supposed participant, both of which were but mere actors.
The volunteers were told that the experiment was based off an interest in the effect of punishment on learning. The actor participant was strapped to an electric chair playing the role of learner while the volunteer administered shocks to them each time they made a mistake in a set of word pairs read to …show more content…
them.
The results found that even when the volunteers did not approve of what they were being told to do, 65% still followed through with administering the shocks simply because the experimenter and the setting looked convincing enough to be true. Thus, it was proven that obedience to authority is not based off of individual personality but situation.
Milgram’s experiment was controversial. Several claimed their experience had opened them up to new perspectives, others felt their minds had been wrongly tampered with. Yet either way, in my eyes, he was just. No one was physically harmed, and mentally, I don’t see the experiment to have been horribly traumatizing. Besides, Milgram’s findings can now be applied in the military and police force, making certain that our troops and officers are following orders at all times, saving as many lives as they can, and extensively increasing our overall protection.
Psychiatric Diagnosis
When we visit a psychiatrist, we automatically assume what most assume, that the doctors know their stuff and that we’ve come to a reliable resource. However, David Rosenhan made the decision to test that belief. Maybe psychiatry isn’t as dependable as it is made out to be.
Rosenhan recruited eight others, and together, they faked their way into several mental institutions saying they were hearing the word “Thud”, and once inside, they behaved absolutely ordinarily, no longer hearing the word.
Rosenhan’s purpose was to observe whether the psychiatrists would take note of their sanity or be overly influenced by the premises.
Ultimately, he revealed numerous flaws with the system. Even though his fake patients were absolutely rational, their psychiatrists gave them the same treatment as truly insane patients. It was found that diagnosis was not based upon the patient, but the context, and what the doctor is willing to believe.
Psychiatric facilities across the country were outraged by Rosenhan’s findings. So angered in fact, that they later accused him of sending more false patients to their institutions, when in fact, he had sent none, only further revealing the unreliability of their services. Though the psychiatry field would most definitely disagree, Rosenhan’s actions were principled and significant. Had he not gone through with his experiment, thousands of dollars would continue to be thrown out the window. And at what cause? No patient would ever be properly diagnosed, nor would they ever be discharged for the correct reasoning. His experiment can be applied to any psychiatric facility at any given period to see whether or not they truly know what they are doing.
Diffusion of Responsibility
At this point, I’ve already explored the fine points behind obedience to authority with the help of Stanley Milgram’s experimentation. But John Darley and Bibb Latané on the other hand, were curious about just the opposite, “What happens when a group crisis takes place, and there is no specialist to step in and handle the situation?”
Together, Darley and Latené set out to recreate such a scenario. The pair placed a college student in a solitary room, making them believe that there were students in other rooms by situating tape recorders inside of them. The trick, was to have one of the recorders play what sounded like someone experiencing a seizure.
The results presented that 31% of the students involved reacted to the seizing student when it appeared others were in the vicinity as well. Yet when alone, a whopping 85% attempted to offer support to the troubled individual.
Being exposed to their experiment for the first time, I found myself becoming more self-aware. The numbers are frightening, to think that help would not be given to those who obviously needed it, simply because they happened to have a larger audience. It’s contradictory to what I had thought to be true in the past, and it made me more willing to make a greater effort to become more selfless overall. So I think it’s overwhelmingly important that Darley and Latané conducted their experiment. Obviously there was no moral wrong to what they did. And now that their results have been put out there, people will become more self-aware like I did, and we will be prepared. The next time a crisis takes place, the public will know to take action the second someone is in need of help. So many more lives will be saved because of Darley and Latané.
Quieting the Mind
Cognitive dissonance. The phrase was first devised by Leon Festinger in his 1957 book, “When Prophecy Fails”. The phrase ultimately translates to a discomfort experienced when two or more beliefs conflict with one another. Within his lifetime, Festinger conducted quite a few trials on the matter, trying to see what changes occur when expectations do not meet reality.
One such experiment revolved around students, half of which were paid a dollar to tell a lie while the other half was given twenty dollars to tell the same. What he found was those who had lied for the dollar were more apt to advocate afterwards that the lie was genuinely true where as those who lied for twenty dollars were more likely to straight up tell the truth. These results supported his theory that in order to decrease dissonance we are willing to alter our beliefs in order to better support our behaviors. It would be excruciating to accept the fact that you lied for only a dollar, and so, you feel the need to make certain that the lie is made to seem true so that you do not have to face that embarrassment, thus eliminating dissonance.
I remember hearing the world was going to end on December 21, 2012. I thought it was pretty unwise when some actually sold their belongings as if they really were going to perish. I couldn’t fathom why they would still defend themselves after nothing ensued. Those who didn’t make drastic changes to their lifestyle were just fine accepting the apocalypse never came. But the select few who gave up everything, continued on, altering their belief to things like, “Well, the end didn’t come in December, but it will happen soon.” Learning about cognitive dissonance has helped me see precisely why they said what they said. It’s all a matter of human need to relieve the frustration brought up by the conflictions amid our behaviors and beliefs. Festinger’s simple experiment was far from immoral, but aside being insightful and intriguing, I don’t see how it can be applied to aid in day to day life just yet.
Harry Harlow’s Primates
Nowadays, it would be hard for anyone to believe, but there was indeed a time when scientists thought that love was only based on a sheer need for nourishment and foodstuff. And for some reason, the majority of the science field would only address love as, “proximity.” It was this that instigated psychologist Harry Harlow’s purpose, to discover the true source of love.
Harlow studied this by separating infant monkeys from their mothers and isolating them with non-milk producing mother figures covered in soft cloth towels.
Subsequently, the infants quickly became attached to the mother’s gentle surface.
In an attempt to rule out popular scientific belief, he also isolated a group of newborn monkeys with a rigid wired mother that only dispensed milk.
Harlow then realized that the baby monkeys were still tremendously attached emotionally to the cloth surrogate mothers, granting they would approach the wire surrogates whenever they were famished. The monkeys favored the soft surrogate mothers who were unable to feed them over the metal surrogates that could provide food.
Built on these outcomes, Harlow determined that touch is the basis of the establishment of love.
In my opinion, the experiments executed on the newborn monkeys certainly pushed forward the field of psychology. Because of his work, we now have more reason to raise our offspring in a certain manner. We know to play with our children, to teach them to walk and play, and to caress them in order for them to love us and grow up to be ideal adults. However, the torturing of the monkeys was cruel, unethical, and Harlow’s work enraged animal rights activists everywhere. It all just makes me speculate what Henry Harlow was like as a person and how he must have grown up to even contemplate executing what he did.
Rat Park
It’s been an ongoing topic for years, whether or not marijuana should be legalized. This is because, like all other drugs, marijuana is addictive and can lead to several tribulations, right? Nonetheless, Bruce Alexander thought different. Alexander believed that there is nothing enslaving about drugs, and that even recurrent disclosure to tantalizing drugs does not end in countless problems like society has come to believe, and he wanted to prove it.
In rat experiments, sedatives were confirmed to be addictive. However, Alexander debated that this was only because the rats would undergo excessive pain in order to pull the drugs up through a straw, that the rodents became dependent as a result of the settings they were contained in. He alleged that if they were left in an environment which was comfortable and blissful, the rats wouldn’t acknowledge the drugs.
Thus, he created "Rat Park", with enough room and sanitary water, it was the perfect habitat for a rat.
First, he had a group of un-addicted rats inhabit the space while both a supply of drugs and water were provided. Then, he placed a group of pre-addicted rats inside with both substances available once again. He discovered that in this ideal environment, the rodents chose not to consume the narcotics, even though they may have been addicted beforehand. With his work, Bruce Alexander demonstrated that drug addiction occurs most often in distressing situations, but, if we are content, addiction will cease to be a predicament.
Rats normally aren’t animals people defend and love, so I think it’s safe to say his experiment was moral and if any of Alexander’s rats suffered from the narcotics, it probably wasn’t worth putting against him. And in terms of significance, although this is certainly great news, I just don’t see how we could possibly achieve total happiness for everyone to be safe from addiction. Unlike “Rat Park”, we live in a perfectly imperfect world outside of our control.
The False Memory
Experiment
This experiment was performed by none other than Elizabeth Loftus, and ultimately furthered her studies of human recollection and imagination. She stated that people frequently mistake their imagination for actual memories, and that long term remembrance can be incredibly insubstantial, influenced effortlessly. Keeping this in mind, she came to believe many individuals in child abuse litigations were being incorrectly condemned on the grounds that evidence derived from childhood memories could be as easy to manipulate as the hair on our heads.
Loftus intended to ascertain this with her experiment titled, “Lost in the Mall”, in which the participants were given a book of their childhood memories in addition to a false memory about being lost in a mall when they were younger. The family of the participants contributed as well, urging that the memory had happened. The results showed a great portion of the subjects actually believed they had been lost in a mall and subsequently formulated narratives on how they got lost in the first place. Loftus revealed that we don’t simply make up stories to support ourselves in a bind, but that we have a human need to fill in the white spaces we come across within our minds. “Lost in the Mall” explained perfectly why it is that people so easily doubt their memories when challenged. We start to question ourselves, and before we know it, we’re believing whatever was told to us. This is significant because it proved that memory isn’t as reliable as it seems, thus showing the judicial system that they needed to find a different method to obtain accurate evidence, not just in child abuse cases, but any case. As a result, evidence coming in would be more likely to be reliable, lessening the chances that a person would be wrongfully convicted. As an added bonus, her experiment was moral. She cooperated with the families of her test subjects and made sure not to step over any boundaries, beforehand, which I think was a just thing to do.
Memory Inc.
Akin to Loftus, scientist Eric Kandel also had an interest in memory. However, he had a different purpose. Kandel wanted to answer the question, “How does the brain convert short-term memory to long-term memory?”
He looked into this by testing slugs. Kandel began by coring the aplysia and putting two of its conserved neurons in broth. From there, he maneuvered the neurons so they could communicate with one another and the first neuron would form synaptic connections with the second. Kandel then showed that by hindering a small molecule in nerve cell 1, a molecule by the name of CREB, he could disrupt the transmissions.
At last, he discovered that if CREB is blocked, and the communications between neurons are brought to a standstill, this is what prevents short term memories from becoming long term. Thus, CREB is the answer to Kandel’s initial question.
In his case, sea slugs were the perfect candidate for studying the communication of brain neurons. Yes they were living, breathing creatures, but how is experimenting on slugs any different from fish, rats, or frogs? How is it any less moral? I thin whoever stands up against his type of animal testing needs to pause and think for a moment. If we are not fit to go through experimentation on ourselves, if we are not able to experiment on any organisms even slightly similar to ourselves, how will science advance? How will the human race be able to adapt? Scientists must experiment, and if it has to be on living organisms, then so be it. It is the right thing to do, to save humanity in the long run. By knowing about CREB, we now know how to make certain that short term memory in an individual can still remain, even after their short term memory is hindered. Memories can be saved by converting them to long term recollections, and it is because of Kandel and his aplysia.
Radical Mind Cures
Chances are that at one point in your life, you’ve met someone ambitious, determined, and perhaps hungry for greatness. Yet at the same time, these folks can be passionate about aiding in the lives of their fellow peoples. Antonio Egas Moniz was one of those people. For the longest time, he lived with a dying urge to imprint his name upon the field of neurology. But it wasn’t until he heard of Becky, a female primate who, through brain surgery, was ridden of her ever anger issues, that Moniz found his true initiative. He wanted to show the world that man’s fretful states could also be cured by surgical means.
Moniz carried out his test on a woman he had come to know as Mrs.M. With her scalp shaved and swabbed, he had two pen point-sized holes drilled on both sides of her skull, in which Moniz and his assistant Lima injected an alcohol-filled syringe to securely extinguish the nerve tissue. Initially, five hours later, Moniz observed some minor cognitive decline in the patient, but this was normal to see just after surgery. The real results came later. Mrs. M was perfectly normal. She was calm, and her anxiety was nonexistent. Post treatment, her anxiety disappeared promptly along with a decline in paranoid thoughts. Many criticize and detest Moniz for his lobotomies, specifically for fixating his experimenting only on live humans rather than animals. Nonetheless, he did earn himself a noble peace prize. I think those who say what he did was unethical aren’t looking at the big picture. Like Mrs. M, none of his patients were forced into his trials, they volunteered, and therefore, it was just fine for him to carry out his procedures. The impact of his work outweighs the risks. Those who went through the tests really had nowhere else to go. Their states were so extensive that it was holding them back. Moniz’s experiment was pretty much their final hope. What’s more, when his surgeries succeeded, people got to live anew, no longer needing to deal with the mental tribulations they dealt with in the past. Moniz gave life to people who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to experience it to its fullest.
Bibliography
Slater, L. (2004). Opening Skinner 's box: great psychological experiments of the twentieth century. New York: W.W. Norton.