Of Mice and Men

Jumping into the time machine today, back to 1968 when a researcher built a paradise for mice. A place with unlimited food, total safety, nothing to fear, and watched the whole thing fall apart anyway.

Transcript

Of Mice and Men 0:00

And hello to you. It's Friday again, time for a bonus episode. And today I want to tell you about an experiment from the late sixties that when I first read about it, I genuinely couldn't stop thinking about it. And I think once I've told you about it, you might find it sticks around in your head a bit as well. So back in 1968, an American behavioural researcher called John Calhoun built a paradise world. Not for humans though, for mice 'cause they're considerably easier and cheaper to monitor. He called it Universe 25 'cause he'd done 24 previous ones doing different things. And it was basically a large enclosure designed so that mice would never want for anything. They had food and water and nesting material. And it was all on tap forever with no predators, no disease, no scarcity of any kind. And you just watched to see what happened when you removed every obstacle from the lives of a small population and just let them get on with it. And for a while they absolutely thrived. The population doubled roughly every 55 days. There was plenty of mousy stuff, socialising and mating and eating and doing whatever it is that mice do when things go well. But then something started to shift 'cause the enclosure had a physical limit. So there were issues with territory and for nesting space for the kind of social roles that a mouse population naturally organises itself around. And as the population grew, that structure started to break down because there simply weren't enough roles to go around. There was food for everyone, but there wasn't meaning for everyone. If you can say that about a mouse, I think you can. And I think that's the whole point. The males who couldn't find a social role, they sort of opted out. They withdrew to the centre of the enclosure, and they stopped interacting. They stopped fighting, and they just slept and groomed themselves obsessively. So they looked immaculate. Calhoun called them the beautiful ones, which is a perfect description of something really quite sad, isn't it? Because they were physically fine. They were completely healthy, well fed with no injuries, beautiful mice. But socially, they'd essentially gone offline. And even when the population started to decline, even when there was suddenly plenty of space and opportunities for roles again, the beautiful ones didn't come back. They didn't reengage. The behaviours that the population had lost just weren't there anymore. And eventually the population collapsed to zero, not because of disease or starvation, because of something more like a loss of the social glue that made life worth living for these mice in the first place. Now, I wanna be careful because there's a version of this story that often gets shared around online that makes deliberately some grim political arguments about culture and society, and I don't wanna do any of that. These were mice, and Calhoun was a behavioural researcher, it wasn't a fortune teller but the core finding, that removing material hardship doesn't automatically produce wellbeing, that connection and purpose and social roles seem to be as fundamental to mental health as food and safety. Well that doesn't feel much like a stretch at all. Now there's a heck of a lot more to dig through into here 'cause this connects quite neatly to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and what Universe 25 does to that famous pyramid, which isn't quite the tidy staircase we were sold as it turns out. And it connects to what we see in therapy more than almost anything else, which is that very quiet, tidy withdrawal from life that used to have more texture in it. The person who's eating okay, sleeping okay, they're not in any crisis, but they've gradually stopped doing anything that involves other people or feels meaningful. Beautiful ones basically, in a well fed, perfectly groomed, checked out kind of way. So the full episode is over on my Patreon. It is also called Of Mice and Men 'cause I quite like the title. Um, it's about 15 minutes and if you find this kind of thing useful then have a new episode out every single week over there, all tagged by topic so you can find whatever's relevant to you right now. You can find me on patreon.com/richardnicholls. And there's a free trial as well if you want to have a bit of a poke around before you commit to anything. Anyway, time to go. Why don't you go and find something meaningful to do. Enjoy your week and I'll speak to you again soon. See ya.