"Boiling a frog in warm water" is a very symbolic proverb, which tells us to be vigilant in times of peace, to "stop" at any time to observe the environment in which we are living, and then to think and make corresponding countermeasures, so as to avoid being eliminated.

Of course, this proverb is not empty, but in the 1860s, scientists did an experiment to reach a conclusion, but this experiment is not so simple, the following let us know the truth.

The experiment of boiling a frog in warm water

The experiment of boiling a frog in warm water actually has a lot to do with the experiment of the soul, because the soul still exists quite a lot of controversy up to now, as early as the beginning of the 20th century, Duncan MacDougall, a physician in Haverhill, Massachusetts, USA, did an experiment on the soul.

He asked for the consent of six dying people, placed them on a precision weighing table, and recorded the difference in weight between the person's living and dead bodies.

The results were that two had no change in weight after death, two lost weight at the rate of one ounce (28 grams) per hour during the four hours before death, one was 0.375 ounces (10.6 grams) lighter at the moment of death, however, after death he gained weight again, and the last was 0.75 ounces (21 grams) lighter at the moment of death and had no post-death weight change.

So the doctor came to the conclusion that the human soul weighs 21 grams. Of course, this experiment is obviously unreasonable, not to mention the fact that he took one of six subjects, and that when a person dies, the excretion of gases from the body and the metabolism of the pre-mortem period take away some of the weight.

The exploration of the soul, in fact, from the 19th century has begun, when the German scientist Gertz is an avid soul explorer, he did a lot of experiments, in 1869, Gertz whimsical idea was born, that is, to put the frog into cold water and slowly heated, to see how it reacts.

However, instead of putting a healthy frog into it, this experiment involved first removing the frog's brain and then immediately putting it into water at 17.5℃, and then heating it up to 56℃, an average increase of 3.8℃ per minute, as a result of which the frog was boiled to death.

This is a familiar experiment, in fact, after this frog was boiled to death, he immediately used a healthy frog to do a control experiment, the result is that when the water is heated to a certain temperature, the frog jumped out quickly. It's just that this control experiment wasn't circulated, but instead the first experiment was taken out of context, and thus the saying of boiling a frog in warm water (I actually don't know why a soul experimenter would have trouble with frogs).

An upgraded version of the boiling frog in warm water experiment

Originally it was a simple experiment, but with the results of the control group, many scientists also became interested: just how many degrees of heat would the frog jump away? Would the rate of temperature increase affect how long it took the frog to jump away? And so began an upgraded version of boiling a frog in warm water.

In 1872, three years after Gertz's experiment, biologist Henzmann conducted the same experiment, but in his experiment, the heating rate became 0.2 ℃ per minute increase, with this heating rate, Henzmann used 90 minutes to 21 ℃ water heated to 37.5 ℃, the results of the frog in the process did not have any abnormal performance, only at 37.5 ℃, the frog appeared to be obvious. At 37.5 degrees Celsius, the frog appeared to be visibly agitated.

After that, Hodgson, a zoologist professor at the University of Oklahoma, did a similar experiment, but he chose to increase the heating rate by 1.1 degrees Celsius per minute, and when the temperature of the water exceeded the ambient temperature, the frogs appeared to be visibly agitated and tried to leave the container.

Through these experiments, the scientists came to several conclusions: first, it is wrong to boil frogs in warm water; second, the higher the heating rate, the shorter the time for the frogs to jump out of the water; third, the frogs can tolerate a critical temperature of about 37 degrees Celsius and it is worth mentioning that when it exceeds the critical temperature, the frogs, although they also struggle, but they no longer have the strength to jump out of the container, and they will be boiled to death eventually.

Frog perception

In fact, the experiment of boiling frogs in warm water (or cold water, to be exact) is not completely meaningless, because the purpose of this experiment is to explore the relationship between the amphibian's emergency reflexes and temperature, and the experiment proved that if the rate of increase in temperature is slow enough, the frog's reflexive stress will be slowly reduced. The experiment showed that if the rate of temperature increase is slow enough, the frog's reflexes will slowly decrease, which is a process of gradually adapting the frog's stress response system to a minimal change in temperature, but of course, even with a slow increase in temperature, the frogs have a limit to how much heat they can tolerate, and they will still respond.

In fact, the frog's perceptual system is still relatively developed, they a **** there are five main perceptual system: smell, hearing, vision, taste and touch, which touch is related to our temperature perception, because the frog's skin is wet, it is not like our skin can prevent most of the chemicals through, but will reach the subcutaneous smoothly, because of this, they can better and accurately through the touch, the frog will not be able to pass through the skin, but will not be able to pass through the skin, but will not be able to pass through the skin. they are able to better and accurately access information through their sense of touch.

Animal temperature perception is also through the skin, the temperature receptors on the skin can capture the temperature change, form a message from the nervous system to the brain, and then make analysis and judgment, in the first experiment, it is the frog's brain is removed, so the transmission of information is interrupted, and there is no longer a system to issue commands, that's why the frog was boiled alive.

Summary

The first result of the experiment of boiling frogs in warm water was that the frogs were boiled to death, but the frogs that had their brains taken out could only live for a few minutes even if they weren't boiled to death, so the problem wasn't whether or not they were boiled, but in the fact that they had their brains taken out, and that, as for the normal frogs, as long as they came to the critical temperature, the frogs escaped, except that if the rate of temperature increases at a very low rate, they may end up having a hard time jumping out in the end because their body temperature is too high for too long.