Are You A Caged Human?

What Rats Can Teach Us About Breaking Modern Addictions

Created by Dall-E 2

In one famous experiment, a rat was placed inside an empty cage. Feeding into this cage from the outside were 2 bottles; one filled with plain water and one filled with water mixed with cocaine.

Inside this cage, the rat was isolated. It wasn’t able to socialise or have sex with other rats. It wasn’t able to explore, or have any kind of fun.

Stuck inside this cage, the rat chose to drink from the cocaine bottle again and again, all the way up until it passed away and died.

For years afterwards, we thought that addiction was a simple equation: Take a substance → Get hooked. Even now, the experiment can be repeated at any time, and the result is consistently the same: the rat drinks so much cocaine water that it kills itself.

But decades later, another scientist realised some important flaws of the first experiments. This scientist realised that the environment the rat was placed in, an empty cage, was an incredibly unnatural environment for the rat to be placed in.

So instead of placing the rat inside an empty cage, they created an exciting environment for the rat to live in. They called it: “Rat Park”.