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Curious Times No. 224
December 25, 2003MAYBE IT’S TIME TO GO BACK TO COLLEGE
A psychiatry professor at McGill University in Montreal has received almost $700,000 in government grants in order to pay students $500 each to snort cocaine. In ways that were not explained, the experiment is supposed to help find a cure for the cravings which drug addicts have for cocaine. The lucky experimenters will be given a mirror, a razor blade, a straw and a bag of pharmaceutical-grade cocaine, to be washed down with a range of protein shakes which are supposed to be able to reduce subsequent cravings for the drug. Meanwhile, an entirely different set of experiments at Stanford University has found that maybe we wouldn’t need drugs if we could just laugh a lot more. Brain scans of test subjects found that laughing at a joke fires up exactly the same neurons as a dose of cocaine. One brain region, the nucleus accumbens, seems to get washed over with the feel good chemical dopamine when we laugh at a good joke. This is the "reward centre" of the brain, say neuroscientists, which is also sparked by cocaine, money, or a pretty face. (CBC) / (Nature)EVERYTHING YOU KNOW MIGHT BE WRONG
Elizabeth Loftus, author of the book The Myth of Repressed Memory and psychologist at the University of California, claims that hundreds of experiments have proven without a doubt that it is remarkably simple to fool people into believing they experienced something that didn’t ever happen. By exposing people to an emotionally charged event, then feeding them false information and leading questions, researchers have found that the majority of people will recall events that are completely imaginary. Loftus has persuaded people to believe all kinds of false memories, such as being lost in a supermarket at the age of five or six, having an encounter with Bugs Bunny, or even witnessing a demonic possession. "We can easily distort memories for the details of an event that you did experience," says Loftus, "and we can also go so far as to plant entirely false memories - we call them rich false memories because they are so detailed and so big." (The Guardian)LET WILD DOGS PERFORM THE "SURGERY"
Be warned, if you’re looking for uplifting Christmas stories you’re reading the wrong column. Instead, here’s a dreadful tale from Zambia, where the government has proposed legislation which would make castration the penalty for men who rape children. The extraordinary measures are being considered after a police report showed that child rape in Zambia has risen 68 per cent over the past year, with over 400 cases reported in the first half of 2003 alone. Most distressingly, the cause of this jump seems to be a widespread belief that having sex with a minor can somehow cure AIDS. In response, the government has asked the people which punishment would be appropriate, and castration seems to be the most popular solution. (iol.co.za)IT’S THE LOUSY FOOD THAT GETS ’EM DOWN
German president Johannes Rau has finally said what the rest of the world has been thinking all these years, urging his people to lighten up and have some fun for a change. During his term in office, Rau often criticized Germans for moaning and whining too much, being excessively pessimistic and exaggerating Germany’s woes. Last Friday he told the Foreign Press Association "Germans sometimes leave a general impression of being broody...(they) walk around looking as if they have too much gastric acid...I wish they’d relax more." The President ended his rant by saying the looks on the faces of most Germans makes him think they’re suffering from indigestion. (Reuters)EVENTUALLY THEY’LL HAVE THEIR VERY OWN TINY CELL PHONES
A specialist in language evolution at St. Andrew’s University in England is seeking approval to begin an experiment designed to teach seals to speak. The bizarre ability of seals to mimic human sounds (much like talking birds) was discovered by accident many years ago when a Maine fisherman adopted an orphaned seal pup which he named Hoover. Eventually the pup began "speaking" English with the old fisherman’s accent, saying phrases such as "hey Hoover, get out of there", and "move over Hoover." Tecumseh Fitch, the scientist who has proposed the experiments, hopes that having undergrads hanging out with baby seals every day will have the same effect, and eventually he will have a group of talking seals with which to continued his research. (The Guardian)WE’LL TAKE OUR CHANCES WITH POLIO
The northern Nigerian state of Kano has banned a new polio vaccination campaign from the World Health Organization, claiming that the vaccine has been laced with anti-fertility drugs to stop population growth in Africa. According to the WHO, polio has increased 30 per cent since last year and the new campaign is designed to eradicate polio by 2005. But Datti Ahmed, president of the Sharia Supreme council in Kato, Nigeria, claims that it is simply a U.S. backed conspiracy to de-populate developing countries. Ahmed claims that tests carried out in Abuja, Lagos and South Africa proved that the polio vaccines were contaminated with anti-fertility drugs. (BBC)NO ANAL PROBES TONIGHT, I’VE GOT A POUNDING HEADACHE
According to the Weekly World News (that would be the supermarket tabloid which screams headlines like "Grandma gives birth to two-headed baby"), aliens are coming to Earth not to explore humanity but to find painkillers for their migraine headaches. A "leading UFO expert" says that aliens with huge bulbous heads and brains the size of basketballs suffer migraines two or three times as severe as a human headache, and so they are coming to Earth to get the pain relief they so desperately need. "The fact is, you're far more likely to find an extraterrestrial darting into a Wal-Mart or a Kmart for a bottle of Tylenol than landing a starship on the White House lawn," claims the WWN, "there's only one place where life is intelligent enough to produce high-quality analgesics on a massive scale."
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