Another thing. Make kittens where glasses with vertical stripes to a certain age, and keep them on a flat surface. Take the glasses off--they've learned what they've experienced, put them on a little platform, they'll walk right off and be surprised when they fall. Rodents are sometimes put in "enriched environments," and metabolically, they're very different then. But you could argue--compared to a cage, is the wild an enriched environment? Clearly it is--the intervention isn't the enrichment, it's the impoverished condition in the cage, that's looked at as the baseline, as if that's any kind of normal. We could think of the enriched environment as enriched, or we could think of it as just closer to normal--it's a non-impoverished environment.

Rat pups exposed to white noise develop seizures, this can be corrected by exposing them over time to a series of simple tones, giving the auditory cortex something to properly adapt to. Lack of specialization is the problem, any noise causes general activity, instead of activating a smaller number of neurons.

I look at chow as a "white noise" food. Out in the wild, eating various foods, various cues might be relied on for food learning. With something like chow, there's less information. A given volume of food has varied carbohydrate, calorie, protein, micronutrient etc. content in the wild. None of these things vary in the diet of a lab mouse. If associative learning affects how fattening a food is, these mice are definitely in an impoverished learning environment.