Paige Colton

Current Research

My PhD thesis is focussed on arguing for the claim that current research into mental time travel in our laboratory rat counterparts will struggle to co-generate knowledge which can be helpfully translated to other environments and other animals (including the human one).  

This is, I think, because the laboratory environment involves a continuous process of standardisation wherein the rat-animal is made into a rat-tool. However, this process of carving a tool out of the flesh of a living animal ultimately induces abnormal behaviours. This is because it overlooks that a rat, laboratory or otherwise, will always be an animal first and a tool second, if at all. Tools do not, and cannot, experience what it is like to mentally time travel to moments in their past, and moments in their possible futures. Tools cannot be moved to act, or to not act, by the sensory experiences of the past and possible futures that they travel through.  

It is my claim that the abnormal behaviours induced by this incompatibility - be a rat animal so the research is relevant, but also be a rat tool so the research is standardised – mean that any knowledge co-generated on the topic cannot be translated helpfully to other environments and other animals (humans too). Instead, I suggest a move beyond the standard laboratory design and towards research with rats in enriched environmental-cum-social spaces which support rats to engage in species-specific behaviours relevant to mental time travel.  

Relevant Links

Email: [email protected] 

Supervisory Team

Dr Raamy Majeed

Prof Christopher Daly