Can Rats Read? | Rabbi Moshe Taub

I'm going to share with you a study that you're not going to believe is real. One night, probably between semesters, a researcher of a lab, They have rats. They test it. You know, giving one rat group some caffeine, the other rat group some water, to see who gets through the maze quicker. And that's how they study various chemicals. And he decided to try something. He took out post-it notes and for one of the rat cages he put on the post-it notes, You're beautiful. Everybody loves you. You’re a genius. We all look up to you. All the other rats in the world look up to you. On the other cage, he put, Nobody likes you. You're ugly as sin. Everybody laughs at you behind your back. Amazingly, when he picked up the rats in the positive-messaging cage, they got through the maze in, let's say, two minutes. When he picked up the rats with the negative messaging, they got through the maze in about three minutes. His students came back from break. They tried it. An amazing study. What does it mean? Who knows. Let's publish it. They sent it to a peer-reviewed journal, and they looked at it and they said, We don't believe this study. Unless your rats read English, speak English, understand English, this is impossible. While they laughed at him, he was a very respected professor of a prestigious university, so several other professors in Berkeley and across the country and really the world, they tried to replicate it, because that is the essence of science. And they were able to replicate it, in any and all languages. Apparently, rats know how to read. The positive ones finished it quicker than the negative ones. So what's going on here? The answer, the running theory at least, which makes sense, It's true. Rats don't speak English or Farsi or French or wherever they did this study. But you know who does? The researchers. And it might have been subconscious, but they read those positive messages, and when they picked up those rats, they touched it differently, they held it differently, they dropped it different. And that's why the positive ones finished quicker. This is a lesson for all of us, parents, educators and those in the workforce. Everything we do is giving subconscious messages. What do you truly believe in? What is important to you? What is your mission in life? They can smell it. They can taste it. My wife works in Manhattan. They don't know that she's married to a Rav. But you know what her name is? Not just as a nickname. It's on her name tag. It's Rebbetzin. She's normal, she's funny, she's humorous, she gets along with everybody, but for some reason, they got something that she stands for something. In our culture, it's not enough to believe something, but you need to make sure that everybody around you knows that you believe it. And that includes our children. They could smell a mile away what we truly believe. If we believe it, we will have an influence on everybody around us and bring the world to more holiness, more purity, and closer to perfection.