‘Rat tickler’ scientist, Jaak Panksepp, dies
His studies revealed emotion in animals
Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist who helped reveal the emotional lives of animals by tickling rats and listening to their ultrasonic laughter in experiments that upended his field and opened new possibilities for the treatment of depression and other forms of mental illness, died April 18 at his home in Bowling Green, Ohio. He was 73.
The cause was cancer, said his wife, Anesa Miller.
For much of his career, Dr. Panksepp was brushed aside by colleagues who accepted the prevailing notion that emotions were uniquely human experiences. Panksepp — along with many pet owners — suspected otherwise, and he sought to prove his intuition through the rigors of science.
“People don’t have a monopoly on emotion,” he once said. “Rather, despair, joy and love are ancient, elemental responses that have helped all sorts of creatures survive and thrive in the natural world.”
He was long associated with Bowling Green State University where, in the late 1990s, he conducted the experiments with lab rats that would vault him to national renown. He recalled walking into the laboratory one day and remarking to an assistant, “Let’s go tickle some rats.”
He credited a graduate student with repurposing a bat detector — a tool capable of recording high-pitched sounds — as the instrument they would use to listen into the rats’ laughterlike chirps. “Lo and behold,” he told the Toledo Blade in 1998, “it sounded like a playground!”
Laughter, Panksepp understood, was indicative of emotion in general and joy in particular. His discoveries were significant because they challenged the idea that emotions came from the cerebral cortex, the part of the brain that performs complicated thought characteristic of human cognition.
His research supported, instead, the view that emotions originated in more primitive areas of the brain, such as the amygdala and the hypothalamus, according to Discover magazine. The research expanded possibilities for treating depression and other emotional afflictions through therapies such as deepbrain stimulation. It brought the study of emotion into the realm of science, when it had previously been relegated to philosophy.