Mice panic in university as physicists have fun

"You mean mice really learned to line up just like people queue for jeepneys," I asked Dr. Caesar Saloma, director of the National Institute of Physics. "No," he said, "if that were so, then we would also ask them to play basketball."

Rebounding from my narrow view of the concept of "queuing," I went on to ask Dr. Saloma who led a group of scientists, namely Gay Gene-Perez, Giovanni Tapang, May Lim and Cynthia Palmes-Saloma, all based in the University of the Philippines in Diliman, more about their study on panic behavior in mice that was very recently picked up by the leading international science news, namely, the BBC, the NewScientist.com and Nature.com. The study entitled "Self-organized queuing and scale-free behavior in real escape panic," published online in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, had a simple conceptual birth.

"I just wanted a new problem for my students that was also interesting. While reading articles on Complexity, I came across some articles on panic and thought about the possibility," Dr. Saloma recalled. Complexity is a field in science that deals with a system as a whole. Traditionally, science has tried to understand nature by breaking it into parts such as in physics or biology, into particles or cells. Complexity is a relatively new approach in science that tries to understand things in nature, particularly the ones that are complex and dynamic, by focusing not on the parts of a whole, but their interactions with one another. And no doubt, panic situations are complex.

The experiment wanted to find out more about behavior in real panic situations since before this time, only computer simulations using differential equations have been done to study panic behavior. But there was a problem: it is unethical, not to mention dangerous and I think illegal, to introduce real panic situations involving humans. But mice have been routinely studied particularly in neurological and genetic studies, to shed light on human cases so the team decided to use mice for their experiment. "Fortunately, my wife dealt with mice regularly," added Dr. Saloma, referring to Cynthia Palmes-Saloma, a molecular biologist, who is also part of the research team.

From January to August 2002, they conducted repeated experiments involving a steady number of 30 mice at a time, in a pool of water in a container with varying exit door widths as well as varying distances between exit doors, doors that led to dry platforms. The results revealed that the most efficient escape route seemed to be one with a width just large enough for a mouse to squeeze through or in the case of another exit, it has to be at a distance not too close to each other, both to prevent the "arch" formations around doorways – a crowding tendency which jams the exit that has been previously predicted by computer modeling of human panic situations. With the "body-width door," mice seemed to exhibit self-organized behavior, a key concept in complexity studies. This is not a physical line-up as I mistakenly imagined, but a sort of an order within that the panic disorder among mice in this case dictates. Another thing worth noting about the experiment is that beyond the 30 mice at a time in the size of the panic venue (representing 11.8 percent occupancy rate), there was not enough room to move around for the mice to even find the exit door. This is important as this may give us an insight on how many people should really be allowed to occupy a given space to allow for more escapes when a panic situation occurs.

Dr. Saloma explained that one use of the study is probably to help in architectural design. One criticism of the study cited in NewScientist.com comes from a fire safety expert in the University of Greenwich in the UK, Ed Galea. Galea said the study discounted the psychological aspects that are present in human panic situations in that there is "an extraordinary amount of selflessness" known to be present in these situations. While that may be true anecdotally, with all the stories of self-sacrifice and great personal risks taken by people involved in panic situations such as disasters, natural or otherwise, such as the Ozone Disco fire or the Sept. 11 event, there is no way to present this by way of an experiment since we cannot "force" humans into panic situations and study their behavior to come up with statistical proofs.

The experiment was clear on its parameters in terms of what caused mice to panic in their experiment, and this was flooding. But I think it also laid out room for the imagination to quest for other related, perhaps more ambitious curiosities since I think it makes us think about bigger questions about our complex, dynamic world, and not just about the society of humans. For this column, I naturally lapse into extensions, an occupational hazard. I cannot help but ask: What about panic in other species in increasingly smaller wild places? With the increasing human population and with the attitude of dominance that goes with it, what happens when wild, pristine places in the world reach a critical low that other species are threatened to panic? Where will they go? Will humans give room or panic as well? What sort of "exits" will be effective to them if we want to avoid extinction of more and more species. With the world unstoppably urbanizing, where humans are crammed into increasingly small confines, what kind of exits should be designed to ensure order and survival in case of panic situations?

I was filled with gratitude and pride to learn this experiment that was picked up with eagerness by the international science community, was conducted only next door, by our own young scientists in the University of the Philippines. They conducted this amid a public overwhelmingly indifferent to science, despite a law-making body to whom this same university has to defend endlessly why its obsolete charter needs to be changed for it to evolve into what a learning institution should be, so it can, with intellectual vigor and matching resources, raise the level of national discourse, help us imagine and think up new ways of being alive in our common future, so that we can discuss broken love affairs of public personalities or even bank accounts of corrupt officials but not be totally diverted from doing what we each we have to do, in our chosen vocations, to keep this republic from perishing. For these scientists, their dance is their science – the very endeavor that saved humanity from the Dark Ages of blind belief and superstition. For the rest of us, a vital part of our dance is to support them and appreciate them, especially in the worst of times. As Nobel laureate writer Italo Calvino wrote: Inferno is everywhere. The important thing is "to recognize who is NOT inferno, to give them space, make them endure." That call, I think, is lasting wisdom even for the darkest of cynics. 

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