The Escapement Mechanism, Part 7
Wemly set up a standard learning test, a y-branched maze with three arms. Unexpectedly, the mouse explored the arms of the maze randomly, showing no preference to unexplored arms of the maze after being removed and re-introduced to the maze. It was as if it had no memory of having explored the maze on previous introductions.
That was odd. Was the device preventing the formation of new memories? Wemly tried all sorts of diagnostics and readouts, but could discern nothing that would explain the lack of memory formation. If the device was doing anything, Wemly wasn’t able to measure what it was.
More experiments were needed, and although she never liked fear conditioning, set up the experiment nonetheless. The device used was a regular cage for housing mice, but with an electrified metal plate across its bottom. When the experimental button was pushed, the current would flow and the mouse would receive a mild shock; at the same time a single 2.7 khz tone would be emitted. When the mouse felt the shock it would stop moving, fearful and tense, and the increased heart rate would be easy to monitor. The idea was that after a few rounds of conditioning, the tone itself, absent all electrical shock, would be enough to elicit the fear response.
Wemly connected the wires and set the mouse into the cage. She checked the connection and ran the negative control, measuring the response of the mouse at the sound of the tone alone, without it ever having experienced the electric shock. It was the baseline that would prove future experiments. She pushed the button and the tone played.
The mouse froze, its heart rate sky-rocketing. Wemly cursed. She must have accidentally used a mouse that had been preconditioned. It would explain both the maze and the fear conditioning failures. She checked the logs, but according to them this was a naive mouse. Wemly would need to reprimand the graduate students—again—for their poor record keeping.
If the grad students were fucking up even the simple logging of experimental mice, they would never graduate, because none of their experiments would work. Most were so focused on getting the required large amounts of work completed, that they had neglected to ensure that it was being done correctly. It was no wonder there was a reproducibility crisis in science.
Wemly returned the mouse and marked it correctly in the log. The whole mouse house probably needed to be validated, but she thanked all the gods that it wasn’t her fucking problem.
Wemly corrected the log-book, and signed out a fresh mouse. She kept the device off of it, and the experiments worked as expected. She should have started with a control mouse, she knew it was sloppy procedure and would rebuke any student who had done as she did, but the lure of knew experimental results had been too great. She had run control mice a million times and they were all the same. This one was no different.
With the third mouse, she once again applied the device, holding her finger on it until the faint beep was heard. She started with the control tone for the fear conditioning, and the mouse froze, awaiting pain from its unseen torturer. Fuck. This couldn’t be.
The mouse was from a completely different house. It was fresh, never having been experimented on. Even the worst graduate students couldn’t mismanage the mice so poorly that she was using an accidentally trained mouse again.
Wemly played the tone again. Maybe it had just been a coincidence, or something else in the lab had startled it, though in her heart she knew that not to be true. Despite there being no way for the mouse to already associate the tone with the painful stimulus, that was exactly what she was observing—a classical conditioned fear response.
Now it was Wemly’s turn to experience an elevated hear rate. Though she had no idea how, the inescapable conclusion was that the device was somehow responsible for the anomalies she was observing.