Hope And Rats

August 1, 2022

Greetings Shat on Westworld crew,

I know a little bit about the rodent studies on the hope that Big D mentioned in today’s instacast. I used a similar procedure to stress rats- exploring male and female differences in stress responses and their effect on neurogenesis and learning.

Let me provide an overview and please be assured that this treatment of animal subjects would never be allowed today (We only used swim stress for 30 seconds and then removed the rats from H2o). Imagine an oil barrel-shaped and sized tub that you can fill with water. For rat A we fill it with about a ¼ full of water and drop poor rat A in. Rat A cannot touch the bottom and push off and cannot claw her way up the sides to escape. The situation is hopeless, and Rat A soon thinks fuck this, gives up, and drowns. This is very similar to the animal concept of learned helplessness and is used extensively as a model for human depression; My behavior is meaningless and has no effect. For Rat B the water in the tub is filled about ¾ of the way to the top so that rat B can see a little of the outside of the tub environment and can almost (but not quite) jump up to the lip of the tub. Rat B thinks he can escape he has hope. Rat B never will think Fuck this and give up because escape is so tantalizingly close. Rat B, with hope, will keep swimming, jumping, and clawing at the sides of the tub until he is physically unable to and will fight off drowning until he is so exhausted that he can not move and drowns. It is relatively easy to see the analog in humans behavior when (and when not) they have hope of success. I am a first-time/long-time listener- if fact I started listening to the movie podcast before Gene was a regular (I am too poor to commission a film.) I had stopped listening to the instacast as your opinions were bleeding into my enjoyment of the deep dive and telegraph. Please do not react defensively Ash- I realize Gene hates this season much more than you and it is my choice to listen to the instacast. It’s just that I enjoy Westworld a great deal, especially when I am not sure whats going on until the end of season, and can not think of a better show on TV among the plethora of SyFy shows currently- but I am very glad I listened to you today after episode 6. Thank you for all the time and effort you put into your podcast for our enjoyment

David

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