Ashlee VanceNYT Best Seller | Reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek

The Mouse Who Loved To Watch Mad Max

1 May 2025 · 1 min

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1:14

In this brief segment of a YouTube video, two speakers discuss an experiment in which a single mouse was exposed to movies for 2–3 hours each day over a period of a few weeks. The mouse viewed a variety of films, and the conversation highlights that the mouse seemed to respond more to movies with strong motion, such as Mad Max, because mice have low spatial‑resolution vision and are especially sensitive to rapid, spatiotemporal changes that are relevant for predator‑avoidance. The speakers note that it is unclear whether the mouse actually “likes” any particular genre; the observed preference is likely driven by basic visual processing rather than aesthetic judgment.

So this one special mouse, um, like how many movies did it watch?
He watched, basically this special mouse watched 2 to 3 hours a day for a couple of weeks. So he watched like a lot of different movies.
And you think, like when you're calling out, I mean, you said Mad Max because of the motion.
Yeah.
I mean, could you tell that it likes any kind of movies? Well, we don't know what it likes.
We know that the brain of the mouse likes certain movies versus others. Okay. And we kind of have an idea why, you know, mice Unlike us, they have a low spatial resolution visual system. It's almost like, I think they look at the world with a very blurred filter. Vision is our strong sense, right? We see the world through our visual system. And mice, you know, they use their vision for specific things like to avoid predators or, you know, and they're very, you know, as I said, they have a low spatial resolution so they cannot like discriminate details. But then they are more sensitive to movement. So movies that have a lot of movement and changes in spatial-temporal dynamics, you know, the mouse will respond more to those movies.