
Rat Park - happyscrappy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
======
bjourne
I'm just gonna be lazy and link to what I wrote the last time the Rat Park
page came up on HN:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7743089](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7743089)

It comes up a lot, maybe because the result is kind of positive and aligns
well with HN's crowds drug liberal views?

The RP experiment wrt _morphine addiction in mice_ has not been replicated.
Also, afaik, Bruce Alexander had a hypothesis about drug addiction, designed
an experiment to prove his hypothesis. Performed the experiment, measured the
results and found that they confirmed his hypothesis. It's not a good way to
do research. The results of the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram
experiments should be discredited for the same reason. Because their results
were tainted by their designer.

Extraordinary claims requires extraordinary proofs. That mice wouldn't become
addicted to morphine is most certainly an extraordinary claim.

~~~
shutupalready
> _had a hypothesis about drug addiction, designed an experiment to prove his
> hypothesis. Performed the experiment, measured the results_

That's the very definition of the Scientific Method, so I don't understand
what problem you're pointing out:

"The overall process of the scientific method involves making conjectures (
hypotheses), deriving predictions from them as logical consequences, and then
carrying out experiments based on those predictions." \-- from
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method)

(That the experiment has not been replicated as you claim could be a bad sign,
but that's a separate matter.)

~~~
spb
The problem is designing an experiment to _confirm_ the hypothesis rather than
to _test_ it.

~~~
tedks
This is not a problem. You can have any hypothesis and any test. If your test
has validity it's a valid way to test the hypothesis. That's it.

The scientific process is a social one, and if you feel that an experiment is
constructed unfairly, you can devise another experiment to falsify it.

Saying that an experiment "confirms" a hypothesis is just a rhetorical trick
of the comment parent. Experiments can only ever falsify.

~~~
te_platt
This is subtle but important distinction. It is absolutely possible to do a
confirming experiment that can give misleading results. There is a nice
explanation in the wikipedia article under "Confirmation Bias".

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias)

A striking example is the (2,4,6) test. From wikipedia:

"Wason's research on hypothesis-testing The term "confirmation bias" was
coined by English psychologist Peter Wason.[66] For an experiment published in
1960, he challenged participants to identify a rule applying to triples of
numbers. At the outset, they were told that (2,4,6) fits the rule.
Participants could generate their own triples and the experimenter told them
whether or not each triple conformed to the rule.[67][68] While the actual
rule was simply "any ascending sequence", the participants had a great deal of
difficulty in finding it, often announcing rules that were far more specific,
such as "the middle number is the average of the first and last".[67] The
participants seemed to test only positive examples—triples that obeyed their
hypothesized rule. For example, if they thought the rule was, "Each number is
two greater than its predecessor", they would offer a triple that fit this
rule, such as (11,13,15) rather than a triple that violates it, such as
(11,12,19).[69] Wason accepted falsificationism, according to which a
scientific test of a hypothesis is a serious attempt to falsify it. He
interpreted his results as showing a preference for confirmation over
falsification, hence the term "confirmation bias".[Note 4][70] Wason also used
confirmation bias to explain the results of his selection task experiment.[71]
In this task, participants are given partial information about a set of
objects, and have to specify what further information they would need to tell
whether or not a conditional rule ("If A, then B") applies. It has been found
repeatedly that people perform badly on various forms of this test, in most
cases ignoring information that could potentially refute the rule."

~~~
4ydx
Yes their rules might be more specific than the general rule, but that is not
a problem. Their rules were a correct subset of the more general rule (if what
you are describing is accurate). Now if they are claiming a broad hypothesis
and only providing a set of data that asserts a subset of the hypothesis, that
is a problem. They are being misleading one way or another. If the researcher
is presenting a hypothesis and misses out on data (for whatever reason), then
somebody else will (ideally) point this out. Nonetheless, just acting like
this misrepresentation can happen therefore don't trust some particular study
is little more than baseless criticism.

------
mamer
I lived in an apartment where 6 out of 8 apartments were occupied by
alcoholics or drug addicts. Nearly every block on that street was the same.
This was Glasgow, and the drug of choice was heroin, although everyone also
smoked as much marijuana as they could afford. These people's lives weren't
particularly shit on a day-by-day basis, but they had nothing but misery on
the horizon. If they had kids they would lose them, they would never work,
never be praised. They'd never see the world. Most of them hadn't been outside
Glasgow for years, if not the whole of their lives. They would probably never
go to the beach or on even the shittest package holiday. Those who were
obviously junkies (struggling to walk, sunken faces and destroyed skin) were
basically seen as an underclass by everyone from their peers, to the rest of
the population and the police. But there were people living in the same
street, in the same apartments, with far less money, working shitty jobs, who
weren't even open to taking drugs. The structure of this area wasn't bad at
all - it could have been Rat Park, if it wasn't filled with drug-addicted rats
who just pissed in the common areas and threw their rotting food out of the
window. I don't have any great insight here - but I think there's more to it
than environment as suggested by this study. There are people all around the
world who live in far worse conditions and who aren't turning to substances,
even when they are available. My feeling is that rats living in cages, who can
see rats living in Rat Park would be more likely to seek addiction. And
perhaps even more so if they see other rats being moved from cages to Rat
Park, but not them. I don't know if rats could understand this concept though,
which might be why they aren't all living in Afghanistan's poppy fields.

~~~
frozenport
I like this post because it reminds us that humans have a complicated society,
unlike rats. Which can muddle the conclusions of this study.

>> I don't know if rats could understand this concept though, which might be
why they aren't all living in Afghanistan's poppy fields.

And indeed humans don't.

~~~
patal
>> complicated society, unlike rats. Which can muddle the conclusions of this
study

Or rather of any study trying to deduce from rats onto humans. And that's not
to say that rats have a non-complicated society.

------
nemothekid
Reminds me of reddit comment I once read of someone's experience with heroin -
[http://www.reddit.com/r/Drugs/comments/1rhn38/heroin_users_o...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Drugs/comments/1rhn38/heroin_users_of_rdrugs_are_you_addicts/cdnfuxe)

~~~
api
I knew someone once who'd used heroin for a while and gave it up and he told a
similar story. He said it "makes the pain go away," and I asked what he meant
and he just said "all of it" and smiled. He said I'm in horrible, horrible
pain and have no idea because I'd never tried heroin before. :O

Immediately made me think of this great old sci-fi story:
[http://bestsciencefictionstories.com/2009/05/17/desertion-
by...](http://bestsciencefictionstories.com/2009/05/17/desertion-by-clifford-
d-simak/)

~~~
ufmace
I remember talking to somebody in the medical industry once. I don't remember
exactly what his job was, but he told me that he had done some work with
opiate addicts. Supposedly, their brains themselves can get so powerfully
addicted to the drugs that it actually generates phantom pain in order to
force the user to get more opiates to make it go away. Every test they can run
shows that the addict is actually feeling real pain, but there is absolutely
nothing physically wrong to cause it. The idea that the brain can work on that
level, actually causing artificial sensations to trick our conscious mind, is
both amazing and scary.

~~~
MichaelGG
Forget physical pain. Opiates make the mental pain, the pain of existence go
away. Stress, business problems, finances, it's all manageable with opiates.
Most people don't know just how much better human existence can be with a bit
of tweaking to our chemistry.

We accept we're no longer in our ancestral environment, why can't we accept
that our default chemistry is suboptimal?

~~~
stefantalpalaru
Suboptimal in what way? We create, develop, improve because we are
unsatisfied, not because we are happy.

~~~
MichaelGG
I don't think that's accurate. Certainly some people work jobs just to get
cash to pay bills. But plenty of people create for the fun of it.

Our brains operate suboptimal because we can not control their state. We get
worried when it provides no benefit. We get sad and troubled when we
shouldn't. We experience intense pain with no way to shut it off. We lose
focus, even when we really want to concentrate.

Everyone should have the capability and choice of modifying their brain
chemistry on demand. Your premise that people should be forced to be
unnecessarily unsatisfied because some of them might go on to do great things
is cruel.

~~~
frozenport
>>Our brains operate suboptimal because we can not control their state.

This is backwards, our brains are _us_.

>>We lose focus, even when we really want to concentrate.

This is a microcosm of the dangers involved, in modifying brain chemistry.
Consider things like hyperfocus or working straight on amphetamine leading to
shit code.

>>Our brains operate suboptimal because we can not control their state.

Many of the things you want can be achieved well by a machine or somebody
without emotion? Do we want this?

>>Your premise that people should be forced to be unnecessarily unsatisfied
because some of them might go on to do great things is cruel.

Its hard to decouple satisfaction from drive, and willpower - we have rather
blunt instruments and current drugs build real dependency problems making it
almost impossible to stop. Today's drugs don't do what you are talking about.

------
voxic11
Or, in comic format [http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comics_en/rat-
park/](http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comics_en/rat-park/)

~~~
542458
Holy cow, what a terrible website. Hijacks the back button, scrolling is so
over-sensitive as to be useless, the left and right perform in non-intuitive
ways, and the animations all have a delay before they start.

~~~
bradbeattie
Further, scroll a few pages using your scrollwheel, then press the right key.
You'd expect to continue to the right, but instead are scrolled all the way
back to the left to page #2. Eesh.

------
b_emery
From near the bottom: "Some further studies failed to reproduce the original
experiment's results, but in at least one of these studies[12] both caged and
"park" rats showed a decreased preference for morphine, suggesting a genetic
difference"

Still, it's an intriguing result. The reviewer comments from science and
nature would make interesting reading - too bad they are not public.

~~~
kbenson
But also, from the immediately preceding paragraph: "Several later studies did
appear to confirm its findings — for example, Bozarth, Murray and Wise in
1989, also published in Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Behavior — but nothing
came of those either."

That paints a confusing picture, so without looking at the specifics of the
later studies for possible differences, I think it's hard to come to a
conclusion.

~~~
bjourne
Wikipedia isn't so good when it comes to drug related topics. Or rather, it is
atrocious since the linked study
([http://wings.buffalo.edu/aru/HOUSING.html](http://wings.buffalo.edu/aru/HOUSING.html))
arrives at the completely opposite result Wikipedia claims. It's an
interesting read because it also discusses why setting up a study to fairly
measure voluntary drug intake among groups of mice is very hard.

~~~
kbenson
After reading portions of that study, I find it hard to make meaningful
comparisons across them. The cited source's two conditions seem to be fairly
close in many respects IMHO:

"The first group was housed in individual stainless steel cages (18 x 25 x 18
cm) that prevented tactile and visual contact among the rats."

"The second condition consisted of rats housed in groups of 10 in a large
stainless steel cage (45 x 101 x 39 cm) that permitted social contact; these
rats displayed normal play behavior, dominance struggles, and social
grooming."

Okay, one rat in 450 cm^2 vs 10 rats in 4545 cm^2, both in steel cages.
Compared to Rat Park, which was 8.8m^2 (close to twice the size), and was
specifically _not_ a steel cage[1]. Then again, I doubt this study was done
specifically to confirm or refute the earlier experiment, but to test further
hypotheses in the same area.

1: [http://www.brucekalexander.com/articles-speeches/rat-
park/14...](http://www.brucekalexander.com/articles-speeches/rat-
park/148-addiction-the-view-from-rat-park)

~~~
bjourne
Rats are social creatures so you can't just measure the area of their habitat
divided by the number of inhabitants. The experiment setup would be analogous
to humans living either in prisons or in solitary confinement.

In my previous comment, I cited another study
([http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9148292?dopt=Abstract](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9148292?dopt=Abstract))
that also failed to replicate RP. That time the flaw of that replication was
possible inadvertently introduced strain differences among the mice. It's
always possible to find some variable that is different and therefore claim
that the result isn't relevant. I'd imagine that's one big reason why
replication efforts is so uncommon in the scientific community.

Btw, BK Alexander has had over 30 years on him to setup a new Rat Park, have
it monitored by other scientists, and prove once and for all that his original
results weren't just "a fluke."

------
geographomics
Puts me in mind of a study a few years back where they had socially housed
monkeys self-administer cocaine [1]. Like all primates, each group of monkeys
ended up with a dominance hierarchy. The most dominant had a relatively nice
life compared with the subordinates: more grooming from others, more play,
more attention in general.

It turned out that the subordinate monkeys were much more susceptible to the
temptations of cocaine. In contrast, the dominant ones were able to resist its
allure a lot more effectively.

The researchers also looked at the neurobiology of the monkeys. Before being
socially housed, they were kept in individual cages for a couple of years.
They looked at the main pleasure centre of the brain and measured the level of
dopamine receptors (of the D2 type) present there. These receptors are
directly stimulated by naturally occurring rewards like social activity, food,
sex, and so on - but also stimulant drugs like cocaine.

All the monkeys had pretty much the same D2 receptor level when they were
cooped up in single cages, with little variation. But when they were socially
housed, the D2 levels of the dominant monkeys rose significantly higher; this
too was associated with their lessened vulnerability to cocaine.

So it seemed that social environment can have quite the effect on the
neurobiology of one's reward pathway, and potential for drug abuse (as the Rat
Park experiment suggested).

On reward pathways - in human stimulant addicts you also see lower D2 receptor
levels than in non-addicts [2], although this is lacking a comparative reading
from before they were addicted, so we don't know if that's near the state they
were in when they started abusing the drug. Having said that, in non-addicts
there is a natural variation in D2 receptor levels, and those with less D2
enjoy stimulants a lot more [3], just like the subordinate, lower D2 receptor
monkeys.

Unlike Rat Park, however, all the above is based on stimulants, which directly
affect the aforementioned receptors. Whereas morphine takes a more indirect
route, with different receptor types, so it's not quite comparable. Still,
interesting to think about how much we may be slaves to our neurobiology, and
our social surroundings.

[1] doi:10.1038/nn798

[2] doi:10.1177/026988119901300406

[3] doi:10.1176/ajp.156.9.1440

------
cthalupa
Diacetylmorphine is still used in several European countries as a front line
analgesic. Other forms of morphine are widely used for pain relief on a
prescribed basis all over. If it is as simple as using morphine addicts you to
morphine, why are no much wider swathes of the population addicted to it?

I don't know that it's purely environment, but there's plenty of evidence out
there that seems to suggest it's more than simply chemical dependency.

~~~
vilhelm_s
Really? Which countries are those?

My impression was that basically the only country that uses heroin for pain
relief is the UK, and even there it is basically only used in cases where
addition is not an issue, e.g. terminal cancer patients.

~~~
cthalupa
I might have been mistaken on several countries - I can only find sources for
it's use in the UK

But it is used by first responders as well:

[http://www.sjtrem.com/content/22/S1/P15](http://www.sjtrem.com/content/22/S1/P15)

A decent amount of air ambulances polled use diamorphine. I'm pretty sure (but
unfortunately having difficulty sourcing) regular ambulances have it available
as well.

It's widely used as palliative care in the UK as well, as you pointed out -
but it might be worth noting that's not it's sole use, and palliative care
doesn't always mean they're going to be dying soon enough that addiction
wouldn't be a harmful issue to deal with.

------
O____________O
This was brought up by Johann Hari on the Bill Maher show last week:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxmvFRtYuYQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxmvFRtYuYQ)

(I heard that discussion discussed on the Adam Carolla Show from the 10th. I'm
guessing it's a hot topic at the moment due to Hari promoting, I think, a
book)

------
MrJagil
I would suggest this submission from a few days ago, to anyone interested in
the subject:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9029301](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9029301)

------
raldi
He's lucky he didn't do this experiment in today's climate; it would've been
the new "shrimp treadmills".

