Remote-controlled rat
example · science-physics ·
retold in 21 talks
Žižek describes experiments where rats are connected to machines and controlled like remote-control cars, illustrating the potential for direct neural control in humans without the subject feeling controlled.
≤2000talks it is told in, per year2026
As told 18
“So I saw it on DVD at least. What you can do is this you have a rat in a cage the rat is freely jumping around then you click a button the rat is connected and you can literally control the rat like a remote control car”
“you can literally direct a living rat as if it's a car... The first results they hinted at me is that you don't even know it, that you still think you're just freely walking around.”
“So that rat is running around freely... you can literally direct a rat.”
What it carries
one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)
Its cast and sources
populated by
Paul Churchland4Patricia Churchland4Virginia Woolf4Daphne du Maurier3Stephen Hawking8Liu Cixin3Thomas Metzinger4Raymond Kurzweil5
alongside works
Every retelling 18
Žižek describes experiments where rats are connected to machines and controlled like remote-control cars, illustrating the potential for direct neural control in humans without the subject feeling controlled., illustrating end of the world as we know it,no free will
Researchers in New York attached a rat to a computer via neural signals and could steer it like a remote-controlled car; the subject reportedly doesn't notice the external control and still experiences itself as freely moving, used to illustrate the stakes of biogenetic control over inner life., illustrating biogenetics and human nature,freedom of thought
An NYU experiment where a rat's neural signals are connected to a computer, allowing it to be directed like a remote-controlled car while the rat still experiences the action as its own free will., illustrating subjectivity,ideology
Žižek describes an experiment where a rat’s limb nerves are connected to a computer, turning it into a remote-controlled car, and extends this to a hypothetical human experiment where the subject still feels free while being steered., illustrating Big Other,subjectivity
Scientists wired a rat's neurons to a computer, making it a remote-controlled animal, raising the question: if done to a human, would they experience loss of freedom or, more horrifyingly, still feel free while being controlled?, illustrating technology and freedom,digital control,consciousness
Scientists wire a rat's motor nerves to a computer, turning it into a remote-controlled vehicle. When they test the equivalent on humans, the controlled subject still believes they are acting freely, the paradigm of invisible unfreedom., illustrating digital control as unfreedom experienced as freedom,Neuralink