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Rats taught to drive tiny cars to lower their stress levels
- breadandcrumbel 7y agoYou'd have to wonder what would happen to their stress levels if they were subjected to traffic....
- hsnewman 7y agoA good test would be to have them drive in Austin.
- wizardofmysore 7y agoOr Bangalore, India
- hombre_fatal 7y agoYou are spoiled if Austin is your go-to example of bad traffic.
- longstation 7y agoHow about LA?
- rpmisms 7y agoYes, driving is a good de-stressor, probably because it gives you more agency when you feel powerless.
- nineumbrellas 7y agoI recently setup a racing sim rig and love to just cruise around after work as I don't have a real car. Absolutely de-stresses me.
- rpmisms 7y agoThat's probably smarter than my after-work "tire warmups". In the winter here, I tend to slide around corners, too. I live in a rural area, so it's not too dangerous, but it's something to do.
- nitrogen 7y agoDefinitely fun, but do keep in mind the amount of noise that generates and keep it to a minimum when within a mile of people. I used to live on a rural road with like six other houses, and people going 100 down a 35 with houses does get kind of old.
- rpmisms 7y agoI have my favorite empty county roads. No houses for miles, great visibility. I prefer going to the south and driving on old banked mountain roads, though. Most people can't even get to the speed limit safely on those.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y agoEuro Truck Simulator is basically meditation without having to think about your breathing.
- rezeroed 7y agoNot for me. Congestion - no agency. No congestion - restricted to following the demarcated path. And cars are clumsy - three point turn. Don't like them.
- rpmisms 7y agoI'm going to go out on a limb and assume you're European?
- nickjj 7y ago> Yes, driving is a good de-stressor, probably because it gives you more agency when you feel powerless. Until you approach that intersection where there's a 90 second red light that you can't control which you always seem to get stuck at. And when you're 4 cars back from that light, there's a 10 second delay to move when it turns green because everyone in front of you is on their cell phone and now the light turns red again just before it's your turn to go but you can't gun it through the red light at the last second because there's traffic cameras at every angle. That's just in typical suburban areas of the US. You're pretty much at the whim of the organization who controls the lights, the government for having traffic cams and every human being in front of you. It's a very non-controllable situation unless you're open to making decisions that will get your license revoked and maybe get put in prison.
- ChuckNorris89 7y agoAgreed x1000. I love driving at night when it's quiet and I'm alone on the streets and the lights are green, changing the gears on my stick shift, feeling the machinery work. It's like mediation, it helps me unwind. During commuter traffic? Hell no, can't really think of anything worse I could be doing voluntarily than being stuck in traffic and watching pedestrians walk by. I feel trapped, like I have no escape and no control over my life. Recently I took a substantial pay cut to work somewhere in the city where I can commute by bike. From my mental health perspective it was totally worth it.
- tremon 7y agoa rat would sit on the aluminium plate and touch the copper wire. The circuit was then complete I do wonder if they had a control group with just this electrocution step, otherwise I don't see how they can relate any of the results to the driving.
- 05 7y agoNo reason no believe rats are sensitive to currents measured in single microamps, which is what’s most likely used to trigger microcontroller inputs. Whatever the schematic, I can guarantee that the rat isn’t used to directly connect the motor to the battery :)
- hn_throwaway_99 7y agoEarlier thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21341057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21341057
- telesilla 7y agoWith earlier video link that was the highlight for me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DINEwuxbI-E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DINEwuxbI-E
- tvanantwerp 7y agoI'm imagining a ridiculous sci-fi future where self-driving car AI never satisfactorily works, so we just stick trained rats in the dashboard.
- riazrizvi 7y agoI like your future. In mine, we use CRISPR to reduce aggression in select animals, resulting in people riding zebras to work.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoIn mine, we use slugs to clean windows and squirrels to harvest crops.
- blotter_paper 7y agoIn mine, we use a tube full of parrots as a telephone line... and then we implement the internet on top of it.
- pvaldes 7y agoTraining rats as suicide bombers to crash cars against cats seem a more probable result.
- blotter_paper 7y agoWhy not planes? The food bowl was a legitimate military target; it provided nutrients that the cats used to build better claws.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- pvaldes 7y agoSmall airplanes piloted by catikazes with tiny machine guns (rat-rat-tat) is scheduled for the second part of the experiment as a source of rodent stress
- rossdavidh 7y ago<insert joke about new Uber/Lyft business model here>
- starvingbear 7y agogood news everyone
- nilpunning 7y ago"Researchers at the University of Richmond in the US taught a group of 17 rats how to drive little plastic cars, in exchange for bits of cereal." 17 I don't remember everything from the statistics courses I've taken over the years, but I don't recall sample sizes as low as 17 being capable of drawing any conclusion whatsoever.
- gabyar 7y agoThe amazing thing here is that rats are intelligent enough to learn to drive, albeit a simple vehicle. That alone is newsworthy, without the experiment on stress reduction.
- blotter_paper 7y agoEhh, it's not clear to me that humans should be particularly good a driving. It's not like we evolved for it, we can just understand spoken instructions. I'm not convinced that an octopus, a dolphin, a raven, or a cheetah would necessarily be worse at the task than a human (given training in the proper format) -- it's perfectly concievable to me that a cheetah might have evolved to handle object avoidance at higher speeds than humans have, for example.
- pvaldes 7y agoNow put two rats frolicking in the back sit of a tiny Chevrolet for a full de-stressing treatment.
- edoo 7y agoI bet this could be extended to mice scale mechs where they learn to (without harm) battle each other in arenas for treats while you stream it on the darkweb and take bets.
- BurningFrog 7y agoWhen pigeons guided bombs: https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/08/25/pigeons-guided-bomb/ https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/08/25/pigeons-guided-bom...
- leoc 7y agoRat-guided cars? B.F. Skinner will give you a small food reward if you hold his beer. http://cyberneticzoo.com/bionics/1940-project-pigeon-1948-project-orcon-b-f-skinner-american/ http://cyberneticzoo.com/bionics/1940-project-pigeon-1948-pr... Actually, come to think of it Project Pigeon/Orcon is also of philosophical importance: it joins Russell's chickens as an example of the hazards of inductive reasoning and greedy algorithms.
- bobloblaw45 7y agoI bet they're more like 4 wheelers or golf carts to rats than cars. I think they're simply just having fun. Or maybe it's similar to the whole pavlov's dog thing, drive a car and get a treat. Eventually driving is associated with treats. Now it would be interesting to see them making the rats drive to something stressful like us having to go to work has an effect on stress. Then maybe developing a Rat uber to see if riding in a rat car to a treat will have a net gain or loss on stress....okay I just wanted an excuse to mention rat uber in that last sentence.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]