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Are Humans Involved In The Cycle Of Life By George Orwell

Decent Essays

Humans have been seeking out a meaning for life since we started living, but no one has been able to come up with a concrete meaning. This is because as humans we do not have any higher meaning for life then the rest of the animals we coexist alongside. Humans exist to live, reproduce, and then die. Through that cycle of life humans are a biological machine which will approach or avoid stimuli in the surrounding environment. In 1948 at Yale University an experiment was carried out with rats to show the power of primal instincts. Rats were chosen because humans could not be ethically used and rats were a cheap, safe alternate. The rats were kept hungry for a period of time before being set on a walkway with cheese on the other side. Clearly hungry the rat would attempt to make its way to the cheese …show more content…

Primal instinct is so powerful though that the draw to get the positive stimuli of eating the cheese out weighed the negative stimuli of pain and the rats would cross the electricity over to the cheese. This isn't the only proven instance of positive stimuli being more powerful than negative stimuli. A later experiment by James Olds and Peter Milner also used rats to show a similar concept. James Olds and Peter Milner attached a probe to the pleasure center of the rat's brain and allowed that probe to be electrically stimulated by a button. The rats were so drawn to the positive stimulation they would run from one side of a room to the other to push down the button that would reward with positive stimulation. Then to further prove how powerful positive stimulation is over the brain James Olds and Peter Milner moved the rats into a new testing location much similar to the last, but this one had the path between buttons electrocuted. The rats

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