Medicine: Sugar & Nerves

The men of science deliberately set out to give the laboratory rats nervous breakdowns. They buzzed buzzers loud & long and blew sharp, steady blasts from an air hose. Finally, half the rats could no longer stand the strain: they broke down and trembled, twitched their tails, clawed the air, lay on their sides and kicked, ran in circles. But except for these nervous tantrums, the unstable rats seemed to differ in only one respect from the imperturbable rats: they had an abnormally high sugar and protein content in their blood.

Psychologist Oliver Lacey of Cornell University reasoned that a disordered metabolism might have predisposed the rats to jumpy nerves. In follow-up experiments, he proved it by injecting stable rats with adrenalin, which increases blood sugar. Result: all of them became susceptible to fits. Reporting in the Journal of Comparative Psychology, Lacey carefully avoided jumping to one possible conclusion: that some of the psychological maladjustments of human beings may be caused by plain faulty metabolism—in short, that unhealthy bodies cause unhealthy minds.