In Kurt Richter's 1950s experiment, rats swam for about 15 minutes before drowning. But when he pulled them out at the 15-minute mark, dried them, and put them back, some rats swam for 60 hours straight. A tiny rescue changed everything.
There was a great study that just blew my mind. This biologist, Kurt Richter, in the 1950s, he took many rats and he put it in a cylinder of water and he wanted to see how long the rat could swim for. Turns out about 15 minutes. Then he wanted to do another study to see, could he increase the rat's persistence? So he took a new group of rats, he put them in these cylinders. This time he stood there with a stopwatch and when the 15-minute mark approached and he saw that the rats were starting to struggle, he reached in pulled out the rat, dried it off, let it catch its breath, and then plunked back into the cylinder. The rat was shown that if the rat just kept swimming, if it didn't quit, if it persisted, something might save it. The rat started at 15 minutes, and after that intervention, the rat swam 240 times longer. It went from 15 minutes to 60 hours of nonstop swimming. Wow. Unbelievable, right? Yeah.
