About

It all started in 2008 when a crazy professor wanted to test the adaptability of the five senses. So he bought a few hundred white mice and brought them back to the lab. After getting the mice used to a whole grain diet, he arbitrarily chose three as the centerpiece of his grand experiment.

The plan was simple. Because he couldn’t easily monitor the sense of taste, he decided to stick with touch, smell, and hearing. He would surgically blind the three mice, and (after admiring the poetic value) place them into three unique environments.

In the first environment, he would try to increase the mouse’s sense of touch by offering the mouse two bowls of food. In the first bowl were jagged, coarse pieces of food, tainted with a mild poison—which would cause the mouse to throw up. In the second bowl were smooth, round pieces of food—which would be delicious to the mouse.

The poison wasn’t fatal, so the mouse could take its time during conditioning. And each day the mouse succeeded picking the right food, he would give him slightly finer food in the first bowl. When the non-blind mice could no longer tell the difference and the blind mouse could, the professor would have his answer.

He made a similar environment for the second mouse—this one focused around the sense of smell. The first bowl would have a scent and poison; the second would have none. Each time the mouse ate the right food, the professor would slowly reduce the scent.

In blind mouse #3’s environment, the professor would play good music before offering the bowl of good food and bad music before offering the bowl of poisoned food. He wasn’t sure if the third environment would work. So the professor had to go to his kid’s wedding, and he begrudgingly left the mice in the care of his grad students. Grumble grumble, thought he.

He came back a week later to find infinite success. The first mouse could tell the difference between smooth and almost-smooth food; the second mouse could tell the difference between scentless food and almost-scentless food. The professor jumped for joy. Yippee, thought he.

When he came to inspect the third blind mouse, his grad student told him something: “this one was most successful.” The grad student put on some good music and placed down some food. The third blind mouse ate eagerly. The professor nodded proudly. I’m a genius, thought he, take that Dad.

Then the grad student replaced the good music with bad music. Blind mouse #3 immediately threw up. The student turned to his professor, “the mouse throws up whenever he hears bad music.”

The professor was intrigued and decided to test this mouse’s limits. He assembled the world’s most renowned music critics, composers, and theorists to play good and bad music for the mouse. With every trial, blind mouse #3 puked when he heard bad music and ate when he heard good music.

The New York Times picked up the story in 2009; the headline read, “Blind Mouse #3 Knows Music Best” in a story about the mouse’s ability to best define music. The newspaper even made a list of new music that the mouse liked called, “Blind Mouse #3’s Entertainment.”