Fearless Mouse

>>The discovery that fear is genetically determined and not learned after birth is very interesting, and goes against what was previously thought.<<

This comment is certainly misleading. It’s an innacurate generalization, really. I think this is an example of the common tendency of the media to jazz up new scientific findings to try to convey a bigger impact than they actually have (also there may be more specific details and many other issues that are too difficult to communicate to the public). If that comment was made by Dr. Kobayakawa (it was in quotes in the article), that’s pretty bad because it came from the mouth of the type of person the public tends to regard as an authority on these issues. He was either pushed to say it, he’s looking for more credit than he deserves, or the sudden attention toward his findings went to his head.

In fact, I have trouble believing that the scientists actually think that they made such a revolutionary discovery that “Fear is genetically determined.” I just took a look at the abstract (summary) of the scientific report they are talking about and from what I gather, the aim of the study was to try to find out whether the olfactory system specifically processes odors that are innately feared (separate from those that are not) and how that information is conveyed to the rest of the brain. But it was NOT to address the issue of whether fear is already built in or not.

The idea that mice and men are hardwired to fear certain things is not only common sense, but some scientists actually already take advantage of this feature and use cat odor and fox odor (at least the chemical that emits it, imagine chasing down a fox to try to get a swab of its odor) to induce fear in mice and rats in order to study the brain areas involved in classical conditioning (by pairing the odor with another signal) or the brain pathways involved in innate fear.

This may be a small harmless instance of mistranslation of scientific findings by overly enthusiastic reporters and other media, but sometimes it can get out of hand and impact society adversely… take Aru Aru Daijten, for example.

Question is.. can they create an elephant that’s not afraid of mice?

In all seriousness though, cats generally only hunt things that run away from it – if they do get approached by a mouse (like in this case) they get very sceptical instead.