its saturday and i am in the office. this morning i decided that i just have too much to do to not go in. meanwhile, here i am and rather than working i am procrastinating.
in the frantic last few days i keep thinking about depressed mice. it first came up a few days ago, when my wife was telling me about something she was teaching in her psychology class. she mentioned studies of the effects of anti-depression drugs on mice. "wait a minute," i said, "how do you know if a mouse is depressed?"
it turned out, you really don't. people who worry about this sort of thing have come up with a variety of ways to declare a mouse depressed. one of which is to hang a mouse upside-down. most mice, when hung upside-down, will wave their feet around, struggling in the air. some mice, however, just hang there and don't do anything. so some scientists deemed these mice to be "despairing mice" and basically assumed that meant they were depressed. of course, it may be that this mouse minority is just into being hung upside-down, or that they are paralyzed with fear. clearly things would be easier if we had a mouse mind reader. it could also be the case that mice simply don't have the brain capacity to be depressed. maybe in order to be depressed you have to be intelligent enough to ponder the insignificance of one's life. perhaps only the smartest mice are depressed, for they are the ones who can wake up in the morning and say to themselves: "crap, i'm just a mouse."
but i digress. back to this hanging upside-down thing.
as evidence that the mice who don't struggle when suspended by their tails are depressed, apparently these mice start to struggle if you give them anti-depression drugs first. but it seems to me that the whole argument is circular. i mean, the reason we are looking for depressed mice in the first place is so that we can test anti-depression medication to see if they make people less depressed. but if successful reaction to anti-depression meds is our main proof that they were once depressed, then a "depressed mouse" essentially equals mice-who-react-to-drugs-we-think-might-be-anti-depressants. and that's not a good sample to test our drugs on.
i have a better solution. we can tell when people are depressed because they can tell us. why not just find some actual despairing people and hang them upside down to see what they do. if they don't struggle, then maybe the non-struggling mice really are in despair. (of course, we should also hang a few non-depressed people upside-down to make sure that people in general would flail around when this happens to them). my wife said this would never pass the IRB ("internal review board," the body that has to approve all experiments on human subjects). damn nazi doctors! they have to ruin all the good experiments for everyone else!!!
as you can see, this is turning into a productive saturday visit to the office
