When people make ineffectual attempts to pronounce "NIMH" it's often in reference to Don Bluth's The Secret of NIMH. Famous for traumatizing children, the cartoon features a widowed field mouse who tries to save her sick mouse kid by getting help from a society of big-brained rats who dream of no longer having to eat garbage for sustenance. Why are the rats so smart? Because they escaped from the National Institute of Mental Health, or NIMH for short, where they were the test subjects of intelligence boosting experiments. Good news everybody, NIMH was a real place and their rat experiments were way darker than the book, movie or your nightmares depicted!

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Albeit a bit lower on the terrifying special effects.

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The author, Robert C. O'Brien, was inspired to write Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH after seeing the work of John B. Calhoun. Calhoun had an idea: that human society breaks down when we get too crowded. To test his theory, he introduced eight mice into something called the "Mouse Universe," an enclosed space with no predators, plenty of food and water, no disease, no bad weather and no hope for escape. The mice doubled in numbers every 55 days until there were about 600 of them.

And this was when things got weird.