There may be fewer ethical qualms about working with insects for many and the U.S. government doesn’t consider them animals for the purpose of testing. Despite this, all good invertebrate neurobiology labs still treat their bugs as humanely as possible. This is done for several reasons. First, ripping the legs off of an unanesthetized cockroach (carbon dioxide or a brief chill in the freezer usually) tends to stress it out (surprise!), causing the animal be less responsive and screwing up your experiment. Second, labs are places of training for undergraduate and graduate students who may down the road end up working with animals for which there are strict protocols and greater ethical considerations. You don’t want to encourage young scientists to torture their research subjects, no matter how lowly. I hope that the Backyard Brains folks are considering this important aspect of scientific ethics in the material they’re putting together for kids.

Finally, kudos to Backyard Brains for developing a clever and fun hack to teach schoolchildren about neuroscience and electronics. It should be noted that, as previously published work has shown, it’s very likely that the effect of the stimulation dissipates over time. The animals either seem to start ignoring the stimulation or their nervous system acclimates to it. To my knowledge, no one has developed a long lasting “neuroprosthesis” for an insect yet. That may be why DARPA had the crazy idea of combining electronics with the nervous system during the larval stage of insect, but that’s another story…

The ability to prove a negative (x doesn’t y) is very tricky. “Pain” is an unpleasant sensation that is produced by nociceptors in reaction to potentially damaging stimuli. Cockroaches do not have nociceptors. So they do not feel pain. They don’t have chlorophyl so they don’t photosynthesize.

That’s an easy negative to prove.

We don’t know what would feel good or feel bad to a roach, how good or bad it would feel (orgasm versus eating a tic tac) and ultimately how it would affect them on a long time scale (pain is important to humans because we remember what hurt and it leaves a permanent impression on us).

Students in college level psychology classes relearned what was already known by repeating the experiment on live rats. It was more “hands on” than reading about it in a book but nothing new was learned by the exercise. Some rats were just pointlessly deprived of water and ultimately killed to give some college kids experience in performing useless redundant experiments.

Nothing new was learned by this experiment to benefit humans or other animals. It was a needless repetition of an experiment with already known results carried out in a culture which regards animals as expendable.

They’re BUGS. Their brains are so simple that before you ask if they can experience pain, you should be asking if there’s anyone in there conscious enough to experience it. Can you prove there is? Because the neurological evidence is against it.

And for what it’s worth, there is a big difference between an “impulse” and a “shock.” For a demonstration, put your finger across the speaker wire of your stereo. That’s an impulse. Now stick it in a light socket. That’s a shock. Impulses are normal electrical activity for neurons, so there’s no justification for using a loaded word like “shock” to make it sound like someone just hooked Kitty up to the electrical mains.

Unless, of course, that biased emotional spin is what you were aiming for.

In the cockroach experiments, it sounds like you’re really just messing with their perception. It reminds me of the cat tape experiments.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-mmjCDHzFQ

Yes, in fact I believe the entire universe is alive, and possesses subjective experience. No, that doesn’t mean I imagine a tiny person inside of everything.

I notice you have not advanced a theory that grants people and cute fluffy animals sentience, but not atoms. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, anon. BTW, as many know, sentience =/= sapience.

This puzzle is not going to remain idle philosophy for long. In our lifetimes we will be able to make machines that appear conscious in every respect. There will be considerable debate as to whether these entities are ‘real’, and whether they can suffer. I hope people like you are not in charge of their development, because they may decide to adopt your ignorance.

“Cockroaches do not have nociceptors. So they do not feel pain.”

BackyardBrain + Blaine = rationalization lulz.

roflnalization?

Can anyone prove that atoms are not sentient and we’re torturing them by performing horrible chemistry experiments on them?

Science is designed to explain the phenomenon we DO see, not the ones we don’t. If someone finds a mechanism for a pain analog in a roach, then that’d be good science. Something to work with.

Can roaches be trained? Can they follow a maze that isn’t marked by their scent but rather other features of the environment? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoMKHfuRKvc

I know that roaches in my house are trained to run, but not to receive a reward. If you start training roaches mark them well so they don’t get killed as a runner.

If it is just stimulation that doesn’t hurt, could all the great science students just experiment on themselves?

Project proposal, ‘Made myself play the piano without lessens!’ No need to go to university if you pull that off, just find the best venture capital “reward.”

I’m not an entomologist, a neuroscientist, or an insect. I’m not qualified to answer whether cockroaches can feel pain. However, many people who are far smarter than I am believe that there’s at least an open question on this issue, at least for some insects. One link here:

http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2007/12/do_insects_feel_pain.php

(In case the link breaks, an article that discusses Hwang, R. Y., et al. (2007). Nociceptive Neurons Protect Drosophila Larvae from Parasitoid Wasps. Curr. Biol. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2007.11.029)

Simply saying that insects doesn’t have the same pain receptors that we have doesn’t prove anything.

I’m not arguing that insects can feel pain. I do know that they are animals with a nervous system, and it’s possible that they feel pain (or whatever unpleasant sensation might correspond to pain for a cockroach). It’s hardly unreasonable — for essentially any animal to survive, it has to be able to respond favorably to positive stimuli and negatively to negative stimuli.

As a matter of ethics, I believe that one should avoid situations that cause unnecessary suffering to other animals. I also believe that when in doubt, err on the side of caution.

I’ll give credit to Backyard Brains for acknowledging the issue. For the others, do you believe that it’s OK to pull wings off of butterflies just for fun? If they can’t feel pain and they’re just mindless automatons, then there’s no harm, no foul.

Repeating the experiment just for the sake of giving someone the experience of doing an experiment on an animal is going too far.

Of course we humans are very proud our intelligence and some of use will use that most prized trait to justify doing whatever we want to species which have less intelligence as we measure it.

Sorry, but I don’t feel much for roaches, thought they did act quite cool in Joe’s apartment…

I bet Mengele started out with experiments like this.

THX-1108

1138. You see it all through George Lucas’s movies.

How dead, insensate matter gives rise to subjective experience is not only a mystery at the present time, but is likely to remain a subject in philosophy forever beyond the ken of science. With our present level of knowledge, Occam’s Razor suggests that there is no point at which interior, subjective experience stops. If there were, you would need to posit a framework in which some things feel, and others do not. Please feel free to do so, because no one has been able to yet.

Obviously, you cannot feel something that has no informational connection to you. If a cell in your finger dies, and no one is around to hear it as it were, you do not feel it. But that doesn’t mean the cell doesn’t feel it. If you examine your perceptions and thoughts closely, you will find that your stubborn sense that the rock you just kicked is not alive and didn’t feel anything is based entirely on your not feeling pain in response. That you feel pain when you injure a person, or animal you can emotionally map yourself to, is your mirror neurons creating real pain in you.

In the absence of mirror neurons, one might imagine people would have a solipsistic philosophy that only we as individuals feel pain, and no other humans. It is telling that evolution has woven the truth into our brains.

When I kill cockroaches I hope they experience fear and suffering and the survivors huddle in their dens trading stories about the terrible menace outside the walls who laughs as he deals misery and doom to their kind.

Can someone tell me what practical, world-bettering applications this might have? The linked page doesn’t have much more than, “We can drive a cockroach.”

This just seems ham-fisted and possibly inhumane. Sure, you’re turning the cockroach but may also by causing pain/damage to this poor critter.

And don’t tell me “cockroaches don’t feel pain.” Even fishes feel pain, so I think there’s a good probability cockroaches do as well.

And as to the uses – how about search and rescue? Not only would the roaches not need years of training like dogs, but they could enter the tiniest of spaces, crawl straight up smooth surfaces, etc.

nehpetsE: Ye, exactly. That’s very insightful. We are, after all, only machines. And if you used your system, with a camera, to steer that baby away from a cliff you’d be a hero.