I've had a lengthy sabbatical while pursuing a program of volunteering. The idea is to get out of the house and have actual life experiences to write about. Too often I find myself living off memories and familiar thoughts, the literary equivalent of eating nothing but canned food. So I've manned phones for an NPR pledge drive, and helped the local blood drive, and put on a demo for the local game shop. It seems to be working, though it's hard to point to any specific correlations - "I saw X today, and I wrote about it." Still, I do feel more active. By the middle of last week, I found myself saying I had things I wanted to write. Wanted to write, mind you, not merely could pound into an entry.
My friend Brian just returned from a trip meant to do much the same for him on a much grander scale; he traveled to Australia, Indonesia, and nearby countries, risking his life on bungee cords and the streets of Singapore. Eileene has a new job with the NY Mercantile Exchange, and Jim is chafing at the sensory and intellectual deprivation of truck driving, so the human need for novelty and stimulation is sort of the flavor of the week.
It isn't just a human need, either, and that's what I wanted to talk about today. Just last week, the radio had a quickie on scientists proving that the brains of lab mice grow much larger in complex environments than simple ones. That's no earth-shaking discovery; I vividly remember a Nova program from my adolescence depicting a monkey kept in a bare cell. It would perform elaborate feats, not for food, but for a five-second glimpse at an electric train in a neighboring cell. And, of course, zoo animals have long been known to maim themselves out of boredom after too long in an overly dull cage. What caught my attention about the discovery was something the radio program didn't address.
Not all creatures need mental stimulus; it's a side-effect of intelligence. Higher birds and mammals need novelty. Fish and insects don't. Now we know that lab mice lie above that dividing line, which puts behavioral scientists in a particularly nasty catch-22.
Science demands that experiments be simplified as far as humanly possible. The fewer independent variables which can affect an experiment, the easier it is to isolate the expected cause-effect relationship the experiment is meant to test; ideally, the only true variable is the one being tested. Living creatures are frustratingly complex, responding to the subtlest differences in their environments in unpredictable ways. (Take, for example, the "counting" horses which instead were responding to the tester's anticipation!) The only way for the scientist to keep things manageable is to keep them in the simplest environment possible. But observe: lab mouse brains confined to simple environments develop differently than normal ones. The mice being tested, having sub-standard brains, quite probably will exhibit different behavior than normal, healthier mice. A crucial premise, that a sample of lab mice will exhibit behavior sufficiently similar to the general populace to draw meaningful conclusions from it, is ruined. The very process of setting up a useful experiment calls the applicability of its findings into question.
It's just one more item for the list of fundamental difficulties psychologists face in turning their field into a proper science. Yes, my boy, stick to physics and you'll go far. The precisely measureable uncertainties of Heisenberg can't hold a candle to a well-developed nervous system.