Guido T. MeijerA
A) Institute of Divinatory Practices, Planet Earth
The fields of biology and neuroscience depends for a large part on the training mice to perform certain tasks, such as escaping a maze. This practice is tedious and time consuming, especially when no unpaid interns are available to do the work for you. As in human populations, some mice are more adept at learning new behaviors than others. If these mice could be identified, they would make significantly better test subjects, and thus greatly expedite the scientific process. The best way to identify quick learners in humans is to perform a Myers & Briggs personality test. This is challenging for mice, given that they are famously bad at filling out forms.
Another promising way to determine which mice are predisposed to quickly learn a behavioral task is to consider their zodiac or star sign. It is widely recognized that zodiac signs reveal much about the intricacies of human personalities. Here I argue that the same is true for laboratory mice and that this hitherto untapped knowledge can be used in the field of behavioral science. Favorable personality traits for laboratory mice are: creativity, intelligence, and cooperation. On the other hand, the experimenter should avoid mice that are cantankerous, unintelligent or uncooperative. For the purpose of this paper, the high-dimensional personality trait space is reduced to two dimensions: intelligence and cooperation. The goal is to define a group of mice which maximize both traits. Using published correlations of zodiac signs with both intelligence1 and coorperation2 a two-dimensional projection of zodiac sign personalities was constructed (Fig. 1).
Mice that must learn complex behaviors in a laboratory setting ideally are both intelligent and cooperative, these signs can be found in the green quadrant of Fig. 1: Aquarius, Virgo, Gemini, and Libra. The blue quadrant represents “wild card” mice, they are intelligent but also stubborn. They can potentially solve complex tasks, but they might not want to. The orange quadrant represents cooperative mice which are not very smart. These mice are ideally suited to perform simple tasks. Mice in the red quadrant should be avoided in experiments at all costs, they are unintelligent and cantankerous.
Conclusion
Forcing mice to solve a maze and find cheese at the end has been a mainstay of animal behavioral science for decades. This new framework greatly expedites the time investment required for experimenters by predicting which mice will be fast learners. In brief, astrology predicts that one should only use mice that are born between Jan 20 – Feb 18 (Aquarius), May 21 – June 20 (Gemini), Aug 23 – Oct 22 (Virgo & Libra) for behavioral experiments.
This framework is the first of its kind in predicting animal behavior using astrology. It’s the first step in a promising new avenue of scientific endeavors. Future research should focus on refining this approach by establishing the Hogwarts house of laboratory mice and leveraging insight gained from mouse tarot card readings.
About the Author
Guido Meijer got his PhD at the Institute of Divinatory Practices; his thesis was titled “Cephalopod palm readings: what can their suction cups tell us about their future?”
Notes and references
1 “The most intelligent zodiac signs, ranked from highest to lowest” H. Jeelani, 2023, Vogue.
2 “Ranking zodiac signs from most to least stubborn” T. Divina, G. Carreau, 2023, WikiHow.