IN 1958, two psychologists at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, conducted an experiment with two groups of rats. One group had been bred to be good at navigating mazes, the other had been bred to be bad at it, so much so that the “maze-dull” rats made on average 40 per cent more mistakes when navigating a maze than their “maze-smart” friends.
The researchers wanted to test the impact of different conditions on the rats’ performance, so they placed the rats in mazes that had “enriched”, “normal” or “restricted” environments. The pair hypothesised that both sets of rats…
