Source of book: Borrowed from the library
At the end of the year, things get a bit crazy, between
music and events and stress and whatever. So I often pick a light book or two
for my late December read. Something I can pick up and put down as needed
without losing the thread.
This year, I went with Elephants
on Acid and Other Bizarre Experiments, which was recommended by a musician
friend. It fit the bill. It is breezy, written in a san serif font, with
headings in magenta. It gives basic details of a variety of weird experiments,
which, as the author notes, often tell us more about the researchers than their
subjects.
One, of course, is the title experiment. What does happen if you give an elephant LSD?
Well, at a high dose, it kills the elephant, which is not a good result, to say
the least. Perhaps they should have started with a low dose.
While this experiment seems more sadistic and sad, many of
the experiments are in the humorous category, such as the utter failure of dogs
to go for help like Lassie. The topics range from experiments in reanimating
corpses to mating behaviors to poop to animal behavior, to experiments
involving the soul. (See Mary
Roach…)
There is a little reference to XKCD
in the introduction, which sets the tone, and reminds me of just how fun What
If? was.
Here are a few of my favorite bits in the book.
First is the bit on the Baby Mozart phenomenon. It turned
out to be devilishly difficult to duplicate the results. (It seems that you
can’t get smarter just by ingesting background noise - you have to practice. As
any professional musician could have told you.) Anyway, this line cracked me up:
Many researchers reported a failure to
replicate the results of the 1993 study. In response, the UC Irvine team
clarified that Mozart’s music did not appear to have an effect on all forms of
IQ, but rather on spatial-temporal IQ, the kind that applied to paper folding
and cutting tasks. In other words, millions of parents were unwittingly priming
their children to become master scrapbookers.
Another amusing experiment involved the question of whether
men prefer women who play hard to get or not. Well, the answer turned out to be
not that surprising to introverted guys like me. Turns out, men actually don’t
tend to prefer women who play hard to get. They like women who are selectively hard to get. That is, women
who are cold to other people and warm to them. This shouldn’t be a surprise.
For the most part, we prefer that there by mutual desire for us, and not
indiscriminate attention to everyone. I want my wife to be in to me, and not in
to other men. And I suspect she feels the same.
A personal anecdote on this topic. I waited over a year
after I met my wife to ask her out. Some of that was circumstance - I was in my
last year of law school and just bought a house with my brother, so I had a lot
on my plate. But also, I wanted to see if she was in to me first. Fortunately,
she sensed this, and encouraged me. This was likewise the way it went in our
courtship. She half-jokingly proposed to me months before I proposed to her,
and she has never left me in doubt of what she wanted. That worked well for us.
So, at least in some cases, the stereotype of the evasive female and the
conquering male is more of a culturally driven myth than reality. So women,
don’t be afraid to ask a guy out…
Another one which fascinated me - and was something I had
never read about before - was the behavior of a certain species of ant. Many
ants have specific strategies for keeping their nests dry. This one, in
addition to blocking entrances with their heads, has the second layer of
defense wherein ants drink up any water which comes in, then go out and pee it
outside. Communal peeing, so to speak.
I also want to mention a study (a series, actually) that I
am quite familiar with, but should be mentioned regularly. Experimenters found
that people will do unspeakably cruel things to their fellow humans if they are
ordered to do so by a trusted authority. A shockingly low number of people are
resistant to this. It goes without saying that this is of relevance for how
totalitarian systems of all kinds come into being and remain in power. It also
goes a long way to explain why Evangelicalism seems to be in a competition with
itself to see how cruel they can been to refugees, the working poor, and anyone
else their political “authorities” tell them to hate. I suspect that it is in
part because they have spent the last several decades purging those whose
compassion might cause them to question theological - and political -
orthodoxy. As one of the researchers glumly concluded in a 60 Minutes interview:
I would say on the basis of having
observed a thousand people in the experiment and having my own intuition shaped
and formed by these experiments, that if a system of death camps were set up in
the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would be able to
find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium sized American town.
Heck, we already have the children in cages. I’d say, based
on my experiences of the last two years, and what I have heard even the “good”
people say, I think you could staff the death camps from a handful of churches
in any town in America.
Also depressing was the study involving a weird doomsday
cult in the 1950s. Failure of their apocalyptic predictions didn’t change their
minds. It only made them believe harder, and become more distrustful and
hostile to outsiders. Also all too relevant to the politics of our time.
That’s kind of a bleak note to end on - fortunately the book
goes from there to the ability of cockroaches to survive a nuclear holocaust.
(There was a great Mythbusters episode on this one a few years back.) While
roaches fare better than mammals, the best turned out to be a parasitoid wasp.
Which begs the question of what it would live on, of course.
Despite a few depressing moments, the book was fun, light,
and the sort of thing one reads when tired and wanting to decompress.
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