The Hope experiment was one of the cruelest and most controversial studies of all time, but it has taught us a lot about the power of the mind. In 1950, Professor Kurt Pritchard did a series of experiments using water and rats. In the first stage, he placed the rats into a bucket of water and wanted to see how long they would swim to survive. And what he noticed is that even though rats are good swimmers, barely any of them made it past the 5-minute mark. He believed that these rats were essentially giving up, finding themselves in a hopeless situation. So he wanted to try again. This time he placed the rats inside the bucket of water and waited a few minutes until they were just about to drown. When they reached that stage, he would pull them out, dry them off, and let them have a little rest before putting them back in. This time around, with the belief that there was still hope, the rats were able to swim for up to 60 hours straight before drowning, showing Pritchard just how powerful the mind truly is.