Murph
:)
- Messages
- 1,799
This is a blog post by some sicentists I respect who make a very important point about how we can be sure a food made us sick, when it didn't. I didn't eat eggs or dairy for several years, convinced they were harming me, before reintroducing them with no issues ,so this speaks to me.
https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2023/06/08/n1-dr-garcias-queasy-irradiated-rats/
At some point in the 1950s, a guy named John Garcia was irradiating Sprague-Dawley rats for his job at the U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Lab, like you do, when he noticed something weird. The rats who had been exposed to low levels of gamma radiation were eating and drinking less than usual, and groups that had been exposed to radiation the most times ate and drank the least.
Garcia thought that the rats might be learning to associate their food and water with the nausea from radiation exposure. After all, rats have no concept of ionizing radiation, so from their point of view, they were going about their day as normal when they suddenly started feeling nauseous for no clear reason. They might reasonably wonder if it was something they ate. In particular, he noticed that the rats wouldn’t drink out of the plastic bottles they were used to, but were happy to drink out of unfamiliar glass bottles. Garcia thought that maybe the plastic bottles gave the water a particular taste that the rats had learned to avoid.
So in a series of experiments, Garcia tried exposing rats to different kinds of stimuli to see what they would learn. He discovered two surprises that called the whole behaviorist concept into question.
First, he discovered that if a rat was exposed to radiation (making it nauseous) after encountering a new food, it would quickly learn to reject the food, even if the radiation came hours later.
This contradicted the understanding at the time of how conditioning worked — behaviorists thought that you had to present the unconditioned stimulus (nausea) immediately after the conditioned stimulus (the new food), or the animal wouldn’t learn to associate the two. But Garcia found that learning could occur even if the rat got sick well after eating a new food.
Rats would instantly associate nausea with whatever food they had most recently eaten, and had no problem doing so. If he made them sick after giving them Cheetos, they would learn to reject Cheetos forever. But the rats simply could not learn to associate their nausea with any other kind of stimulus. It didn’t matter if the stimulus was bright lights, or an annoying buzzer. No matter how many times Garcia flashed lights at them, the rats never learned to associate their nausea with the lights.
... continues at link... https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2023/06/08/n1-dr-garcias-queasy-irradiated-rats/
https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2023/06/08/n1-dr-garcias-queasy-irradiated-rats/
At some point in the 1950s, a guy named John Garcia was irradiating Sprague-Dawley rats for his job at the U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Lab, like you do, when he noticed something weird. The rats who had been exposed to low levels of gamma radiation were eating and drinking less than usual, and groups that had been exposed to radiation the most times ate and drank the least.
Garcia thought that the rats might be learning to associate their food and water with the nausea from radiation exposure. After all, rats have no concept of ionizing radiation, so from their point of view, they were going about their day as normal when they suddenly started feeling nauseous for no clear reason. They might reasonably wonder if it was something they ate. In particular, he noticed that the rats wouldn’t drink out of the plastic bottles they were used to, but were happy to drink out of unfamiliar glass bottles. Garcia thought that maybe the plastic bottles gave the water a particular taste that the rats had learned to avoid.
So in a series of experiments, Garcia tried exposing rats to different kinds of stimuli to see what they would learn. He discovered two surprises that called the whole behaviorist concept into question.
First, he discovered that if a rat was exposed to radiation (making it nauseous) after encountering a new food, it would quickly learn to reject the food, even if the radiation came hours later.
This contradicted the understanding at the time of how conditioning worked — behaviorists thought that you had to present the unconditioned stimulus (nausea) immediately after the conditioned stimulus (the new food), or the animal wouldn’t learn to associate the two. But Garcia found that learning could occur even if the rat got sick well after eating a new food.
Rats would instantly associate nausea with whatever food they had most recently eaten, and had no problem doing so. If he made them sick after giving them Cheetos, they would learn to reject Cheetos forever. But the rats simply could not learn to associate their nausea with any other kind of stimulus. It didn’t matter if the stimulus was bright lights, or an annoying buzzer. No matter how many times Garcia flashed lights at them, the rats never learned to associate their nausea with the lights.
... continues at link... https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2023/06/08/n1-dr-garcias-queasy-irradiated-rats/