The Daily "ECHO"

The Daily Echo: The Power of Hope and Rats: June 13, 2019

June 13, 2019

Anybody heard of this guy? Curt Richter? You have? That’s good.

So Dr. Richter graduated from Harvard University and he went on to be a professor at John Hopkins University. He did a series of experiments that were later came to be known as the Hope experiments. Has anybody heard of the Hope experiments?

So what he did, was he took two groups of rats and he had them swim in high sided buckets of circulating water. The first group of rats he had them swimming as long as they could before they sunk to the bottom. They couldn’t swim anymore. They gave up, sunk. The second group of rats, he did the same thing, but for the first group of rats, guess how long it took for them to sink to the bottom. How long could a rat swim before drowning?

Fifteen minutes. A rat can last, you know, they have little legs right? There’s not much going on there. Fifteen minutes a ran could last. But the second group of rats, he did the same exact thing. He put them in those, the buckets of circulating water, had them swim as long as they could. Right as they started to sink though, he saved them, dried them off, let them rest and then put them back into the same buckets of circulating water. Guess how long they could swim the second time?

Sixty hours.

Two hundred and forty times longer than the first group of rats. You can look it up. She doesn’t believe me, look it up. It’s true. Two hundred and forty times longer.

Nonstop, yeah.

So how is this possible, right? They didn’t rest long enough to get stronger. It’s not like their muscles grew all of the sudden. They weren’t pumped full of steroids. Kurt Richter concluded that they were given hope. They had a vision of what being saved was like and so they kept swimming for that. A better conclusion is they were given energy through hope. Now let me give you a more practical example. Has anybody in here ever played a sport? This little kid’s raising her hand, good job. Anybody in here ever played a sport, done any kind of working out ever? Most of the room, okay.

So if you played a sport, you’ve probably done sprints at some point, right? You’ve had to be on a line, do line sprints or a basketball court or a tennis court, whatever it might be. Your coach is yelling at you. You’re springing back and forth, it’s very tiring. You’re exhausted. You don’t know how much energy to save or how much energy to give, but then sooner or later your coach yells out, last one, give everything. Then all of the sudden, you have ten times as much energy, right? Right? You guys have all experienced this. You go twice as fast as you did the second to last one. Why is that? It’s because what you have in front of you is defined. The more you define what you have in front of you, the more energy you’ll have to achieve it. The more you define what you have in front of you, the more energy you’ll have to achieve it. Purpose equals, equals energy.

You Might Also Like