Chapter 15 nervous rat

Li Guodong has books piled on his bed and sleeps on tatami every night.I read until one or two in the morning, when my eyes were bloodshot and painful like needle pricks, and then I let go of the book.He curled up on the tatami mat, tied his left leg to a table leg with a rope, and went to sleep with the lights off. "In this way, as soon as I turn over and can't move my legs, I will wake up; when I wake up, I will immediately get up and continue reading-this year is the third year, if I fail the exam, I will go to the army!" Before the entrance exam, Li Guodong explained his lifestyle in this way very calmly.There was a layer of dark blueness floating on his thin cheeks, and there were thin streaks of blood in the whites of his eyes.When he was speaking, his eyes were slack, and he didn't know where he was looking.

"Why don't you change your reading method? Isn't this tormenting method very effective?" He shook his head: "I don't know of any other way." "Why don't you become a soldier first and then come back to take the exam? Give your mind a rest?" He shook his head: "I must pass the exam." "Why not find another way out? Don't go to university, vocational school or technology?" He started biting his nails, each nail was chewed to rotten hairs: "No, I have to go to college." ※ ※ ※ Li Guodong still fell out of the list later, but he didn't go to the army either.After he stayed in the mental hospital for two weeks, one night, he secretly swallowed five large iron nails, jumped off the balcony on the seventh floor, and fell right next to the garbage truck.

※ ※ ※ Professor Mayer is very interested in mice, and once conducted such an experiment: Gather the mice on a platform and let them jump to the next two doors one by one; jump to the left door, it will be bruised, jump to the right door, but the door will open, behind the door is sweet cheese.Of course the little mouse is not stupid, after a few times of training, he will happily always jump to the right door, without falling down. However, when the mouse's choice was fixed, Maier moved the cheese from the right door to the left door; the mouse, which thought it would be a good meal, was now bruised and swollen, unaware that the objective situation had changed.Fortunately, after falling several times, it gradually got used to the new situation: it turned out that the cheese was on the left!

The problem is, at this time, Maier has a new trick; he repaints the color of the door, puts the cheese on the left for a while, and puts the cheese on the right for a while. One must constantly adapt to new situations and constantly revise one's habitual behavior... The mouse can't change, and the next reaction is to "respond to all changes with the same".Maier found that when the situation was overwhelmed, the mouse would "twist" and become stubborn, refusing to change the way at all.For example, if it is used to jumping to the left door, you put the cheese on the right door clearly so that it can see it, but it will still slam its swollen nose toward the left door, and the more you touch it, the more nervous it will be.If the experimenter continues to force it to make the choice of jumping left or jumping right at this threshold, the rat will often cramp, run wildly, bump around or bite itself, and then tremble all over until it falls into a coma.In other words, the rat had a "nervous breakdown."

Professor Meyer then summed up the five stages that lead to the "mental breakdown" of rats: First, for a certain problem (left door or right door), the rats gradually develop a habit of coping (choose the right door; there is cheese on the right door). ).In the second stage, the objective environment changed, and the rats were horrified when they realized that the usual methods could no longer solve the problem.In the next stage, after constant anxiety, frustration, and failure, it will stubbornly face the new situation in the old way, regardless of the consequences (that is, when it sees cheese appearing on the right, it still rushes to the left).In the fourth stage, give up trying at all (you don’t eat cheese, you just starve to death!).Finally, if external force forces it to solve the problem, it will return to the old way it is used to (the left door is the left door, the left door must be left!) Of course, it will be bruised and swollen, and the eyes will be blinded by hunger.Obviously just changing the way can solve everything, but it insists on suffering from setbacks and failures in its habitual behavior, and finally ends in collapse. [From SI Haayakawa, "1 Insoluble Problems," Invention and Design, NY1981.]

※ ※ ※ Li Guodong, who was discovered by the cleaners by the garbage truck, is a "twisted" mouse. Our social environment and education system are experimenters who control cheese and create difficult problems.Once upon a time, the gate of university was the gate to cheese, and everyone jumped to that gate. The concept of "scholar-bureaucrat" is deeply rooted, because we realize that after becoming a "scholar-bureaucrat", there will be sweet cheese to eat.However, after everyone got used to this method, the objective situation changed, and the cheese changed doors; when they slammed into the door of "scholar-bureaucrats", they got bruised and bruised, and there was no cheese.

But the children keep knocking on the door; the parents keep on encouraging the kids to knock on the cheeseless door.They say, "Where there is a will, things will come true"; they say "permanence is the foundation of success";The color of the door has changed, the position of the cheese has been changed, but those who have "screwed" stubbornly stick to the old way, "responsible to all changes with the same". So early one morning, the cleaners found a mass of blood and flesh beside the garbage truck—is it a human or a mouse?He was startled. ※ ※ ※ A person is nothing more than a mouse that can only have a nervous breakdown.At every stage of life, seemingly insoluble problems constantly forced him to make choices: he failed an exam, his lover changed his mind, his marriage broke up, his job was lost.Every puzzle needs a solution.Is the cheese on the left or the right?On the left or on the right, when a person can no longer cope with "new" situations in a "new" way, when he recklessly refuses to change himself at all, he is a "screwed" mouse ;The disintegration of the spirit is only the natural end;

A country, is it not a mouse that may have a nervous breakdown? !Changes in the international situation are like cheese that is sometimes on the left and sometimes on the right.The solutions to problems thirty years ago may not be the solutions to problems twenty years from now.How not to be constrained by old habits, old concepts, and old methods, how not to "twist" and hit a door without cheese and get bruised and swollen, what is needed is flexibility and wisdom. Isn't wisdom the difference between a human being and a mouse being a mouse?