Rice jar experiment: the result

Remember that I started to talk to rice? A short recap of the experiment in case you missed it: you have two jars and put rice in both of them. One jar you overload with love every single day. The other one you overload with hate. Then somehow the hate jar should get rotten, while the love jar looks perfectly fine, even after weeks.

After 19 days the experiment was aborted, because I left for a couple of days to Prague and couldn’t keep up with feeding my rice emotions while I was away. You might recall that my hypothesis was that there wouldn’t be any difference between the jars. In my case, my love jar turned into a mouldy one, while my hate jar stayed perfectly fine. As you can see in the picture, the love jar turning into an ugly (and probably smelly; I haven’t dared to open te lid) colour.

My rice jars after 19 days. On the left: ‘hate jar’, on the right: ‘love jar’.

I cannot present these pictures to you without also pointing out reasons why my experiment was or could be flawed (apart from all the obvious stuff I already pointed out in the introduction to the experiment):

♥ 2 Minutes a day isn’t a lot. I’m not sure if a bare 2 minutes of positive attention doesn’t simply equal ‘ignoring the rice’.
♥ (probably the most obvious reason:) There is a crack in the lid of the positive rice jar.
♥ My roommate boycotted my experiment and occasionally shouted words of affection to the hate jar.
♥ Sometimes my mind would wander when I should be thinking positive/negative thoughts.
♥ Later I switched from ‘talking positive’ in my mind, to thinking thoughts that would evoke a positive feeling. Although that sounds similar, it can be very different. It’s hard to say: ‘I am so happy you’re on my desk’ and mean it, when the rice jar is starting to mould and you’re kind of done with the whole thing. So I switched to thoughts that evoke a positive emotion instead, like rainbows, glittery unicorns, coffee, Joran, and other fun things. So I didn’t test the same continuous method.

Anyway, I had fun with the experiment for as long as it lasted. Have you heard of any other wacky experiments I should try?