Strange, Mean And Useless Experiments
Photo Source: Stock.xching Sometimes you just can't help but wonder why certain experiments were conducted. Some are just so bizarre and really prove nothing and others are just plain stupid or pointlessly cruel. One experiment is said to show that we as humans are all killers. The experiment was composed of teams of two people. One was a volunteer and the other an actor. The volunteers didn't know that the second person was an actor they assumed that he was another volunteer. Here is how the experiment worked. The actor was supposed to memorize word pairs and when he got them wrong the other person was to hit a button that shocked him. Each time he got the pairs wrong the voltage was increased by 15 volts. The experiment was really being conducted to see how long one person would keep shocking the other, would he do it until he killed the other person. To the surprise of the people that conducted the testing, 2/3 rds of the people tested continued to keep shocking the other person even when they thought that he was receiving over 150 volts. One famous experiment called for people to cut the heads off rats. Now you might wonder what could be the reason for this experiment? By the way the rats were alive. The experiment had more to it than that, the rat head cutting was the final step. The idea was to study the faces of people under certain situations. The experimenter had people smelling distasteful odors, watch pornography and had them stick their hands into buckets with slimy things in them. So what was learned if anything from this experiment? Nothing very useful really. The only thing learned was that different people make different faces under these same conditions.
Photo Source: Stock.xching A truly strange experiment took place in Sweden about 3 years ago. You may have seen scenes in the movies where people swap bodies. Well the Swedish scientists wondered if they could trick people into thinking that this had really happened. Why would someone want to do that? I guess as the saying goes, because they can. The Swedes used virtual reality to fool the subjects and they were actually successful. One experiment even had people believing that they had swapped bodies with mannequins. I don't know the exact parameters of the tests, but I know that at one point a mannequin had cameras put into its eye sockets and tiny screens were set up in front of the eyes of a subject and he then saw what the mannequin saw. When the persons stomach was touched with a stick, the mind tricked the person into thinking that he was the mannequin. The last part of the experiment was when cameras were mounted on a different person and when he turned to shake hands with the first person with the screens in front of his eyes he saw himself and felt that he was in the other body. Oh those crazy Swedes.
Photo Source: Stock.xching For hundreds of years and maybe longer, scientist and doctors have been trying to prove the physical existence of a soul. The idea was that there had to be a place inside the body where the soul could be, so it needed space. As the medical profession learned more they couldn't find a place, so a physician named MacDougall devised an experiment to prove the existence of a soul. He reasoned that a soul had to have some weight, so he constructed a scale that was extremely accurate for the time (1896). The idea was to put someone on the scale that was about to die, record their weight and then record it again right after their death. The difference in weight was the soul leaving the body. A dying man volunteered for the experiment and at the moment of his death he lost 21 grams of weight. Two other patients lost 10 and 14 grams at the instant of their death. There had been two other patients who died on the scales, but one had been interfered with by the hospital who was against the experiments and the other was put on the scale and died almost immediately and MacDougall felt that this ruined the test results. In 1939 a group of orphan children were experimented on. The experiment took place at the University of Iowa and was conducted by Wendell Johnson. It was rather despicable. He took a group of orphans and divided them into two groups. One group he gave positive speech therapy to and praised the way they talked. The other group he gave negative speech therapy to and belittled those children for every mistake in their speech. What happened was that even though most of the negative group had normal speech, they suffered psychological effects for the rest of their lives. Nice going Wendell, what a nice guy. The facts about this experiments were kept hidden to protect Wendell, but the facts eventually got out and the experiment became known as the Monster Study. It seems that the British have decided to start blowing up pigs. Yes you read that correctly. They say that this is necessary to understand the effects of bomb blasts on humans. The pigs had their spleens removed, and tubes were inserted into different parts of their bodies and a wire inserted into a major abdominal blood vessel. This was to make sure that the vessel became lacerated in the explosion. The military states that the animals were put under anesthesia The scientists said that they wanted to see how long an animal can survive when more than one third of their blood vessels are drained. One politician has stated, “These are revolting and unnecessary experiments. Sadly, we are too familiar with the effects of terrorism. It is perfectly possible to find out things we don’t know without blowing up pigs to find out.” There were no pig survivors. While there could possibly be a reason for one or two of the experiments listed, these reasons would have to be very far fetched to say the least. If one was to list all the crazy experiments that have been carried out in the name of science, they would fill many books. |
