May 4, 2018 • 39 mins
What part of the turkey are turkeys most attracted to? Can a scene out of a ghost story make you stop biting your nails? And what's the best music to play for your house guests, if your house guests are rats and they're high on cocaine? Will and Mango explore some of the strangest science experiments and the reasons they got funded in the first place.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Guess what will? What's that? Mango? So have you heard
of this experiment from Albany Medical College where they tried
to figure out whether rats like jazz or classical music more?
I don't know how I haven't heard about this because
it seems like a really important experiment, and actually I
have to meet I am curious so so so which
one do they like? More? So? The scientists played for
a lease on loop for ninety minutes, and then they'd
(00:21):
switched to Miles Davis and his song four, So they
just go from Ford for at least to four. And
of course they discovered that the rats like silence better
than continuous music. But when they had to choose, the
rats like Beethoven more than hard bop. And I guess
that makes sense. If we're talking about on repeat and
they're having to hear this over and over, I guess
it's a little more soothing, right, Yeah. But the experimenters
(00:44):
weren't done then, so I have no idea why they
did this. They injected the rats with cocaine after this
for seven straight days, and once the rats had this
cocaine just racing through their system, they couldn't get enough.
Miles Davis also makes sense fairly. Science tells us that
coked up rats really love jazz. But there's a whole
(01:07):
world of questionable science experiments, from the weird to the
funny to the seriously ill advised. And that's what today's
show is all about. Let's dig in a their podcast. Listeners,
(01:37):
Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as
always I'm joined by my good friend man Guesh Ticketer
and on the other side of the soundproof glass, putting
his good name on the line for the sake of
science conducting what is we assume the first ever scientific
attempt to bring a potato back to life. That's our
friend and producer Tristan McNeil, a potato back to life. Mano,
this is big science. I saw the potatoes, I saw
(01:59):
the labco I had no idea what was going on there.
I think that's what the defibrillator is for. And you
might be wondering how you can tell the difference between
a live and a dead potato. Well, those are all
heavy questions, and hopefully Tristan's work will help shed some
light on just a few of those. It may be
two over our heads. We'll see most of what Tristan
does is But anyway, I know this experiment sounds ridiculous,
(02:22):
but honestly, everything on today's show sounds a little ridiculous.
So we'll dig into some of the weirdest, most questionable
science experiments in history. Now, Mango, I know, for a
while as a kid you wanted to be a scientist,
and I've heard you talk about some of the experiments
you conducted. So did you come up with any terrible
experiments along the way? So many? I mean, you know,
my dad's a scientist, and he's a good one. So
(02:44):
we test things and I tell him about inventions, ideas
for inventions I had, Like I had an idea for
a d microwave, and the whole idea was that, like
you could cool down a hot bagel fast. And yeah,
you tell me like why it would or wouldn't work,
or what I'd have to think about. But I think
the biggest failure I had as a kid was in
second grade and my friends and I were at the
(03:05):
bus stop and we always wanted a day off from school,
you know, especially when the weather was nice, because you
want to stay home and play and whatever. So I
hatched this amazing scheme, like our our friend Kristen had
access to a ton of gum for some reason, and
I knew that gum on the ground is sticky when
you step on it. And I don't remember how we
calculated this out, but there were drawings and some terrible
(03:27):
math involved, but we figured that if we could get
a big enough wad of sticky gum in the right place,
the school bus tire would probably stick to it and
get stuck there for the day and we wouldn't have
to go to school. I really want to hear that
this worked, but I'm going to guess that maybe this
didn't work. Yeah, of course not. I mean, my calculations
were off, I guess. And but the plan was like
(03:48):
so elaborate. We we planned about it, we talked about it,
We made this giant wad of gum, and then we
placed it in what we thought was going to be
the perfect spot. And then the school bus tire didn't
even roll over and so super anti climatic, and we
sort of like deflatedly walked onto the school bus. But uh,
now that I think about, the gum was also care free,
(04:09):
so it wasn't really like a sticky type of gum.
That was your problem because care Free was it's sugarless, right, Yeah,
but I mean you go to war with the gum
you have and it was not a great day for science.
All right, Well, today's show is all about odds science experiments,
and just because their bizarre doesn't mean we should automatically
discount them. In fact, I was reading this article by
(04:30):
Alex Boss and he wrote a great book about odds
science experiments, and there's a section where Alex explains why
he first got into weird projects and and why he
believes they should still be thought of as worthwhile. So
I just want to read a bit from this. So
here's what he says. I confess I had no profound
intellectual motive at first. I simply found them fascinating. They
filled me with disbelief, astonishment, discussed, and best of all laughter.
(04:54):
But with hindsight, perhaps there is a deeper message. These
experiments are not the work of cranks. All were performed
by honest, hard working scientists who were not prepared to
accept a common sense explanation of how the world works.
Sometimes such single mindedness leads to brilliant discoveries. At other
times it can end up closer to madness. Unfortunately, there's
no way of knowing in advance where the journey will lead. Yeah,
(05:17):
I mean, that's certainly something to keep in mind as
we go along. But while it might be true that
none of the people that Alex talked about were crackpots,
some of the ones I want to talk about definitely work.
So this includes the first guy we've gone on the list,
a Renaissance era physician and alchemist named Paracelsus. Now Parasulsis
is known for doing some of the earliest research in
toxicology and also psychotherapy, which are I guess both weird
(05:39):
in their own right, but without doubt his strongest claim
to theme was his account of how to grow your
own homunculous. To grow your own homunculous, mega can grow
your own I do want to confess I'm a little
rusty on my pseudoscience lingo from what you said the right. So, so,
what exactly is a humunculous. It's a mythological creature. Apparently,
(06:02):
parasols Is believed in all sorts of those, including giants
and wood nymphs. But homunculus was basically like a tiny
living human the size of a doll or something and
Paracelsis actually claimed to have made his own, which he
said was about a foot tall. Right, And you said
this man was a doctor, right, Yeah, I mean it
was easier to get into medical school back then. Some
(06:24):
people thought he was a medical genius. Others thought he
was more of this loud mouth drunk type. I'm guessing
the truth was somewhere in between. But these are actually
the instructions Paracelsus has laid out to create your own
little homunculus. So here we go. Let the seat of
a man by itself be putrified in a gored glass
and sealed up in horse done for the space of
(06:44):
forty days, until so long as it begins to be alive,
move and stir. After this time, it will be something
like a man, yet transparent and without a body. Now,
after this, if it be every day warily, imprudently nourished
and fed with man's blood, and be kept for the
ace of forty weeks and a constant equal heat of
horse dung, it will become a true and living infant.
(07:07):
You know what, just hearing this, it kind of makes
me want to go back and watch those old s
n L skits where Steve Martin played the medieval barber,
because it sounds like pretty similar advice. And you know,
I admire paracelsis ingenuity, and obviously at the time they
had a much different set of knowledge. But I feel
like it might be smarter for the human race to
stick with the you know, the old fashioned horse dung
(07:28):
freeway to make a true and living infant. But anyway,
you know, word of crazy experiments like this and these
medical fallacies, they got passed around a lot during the
Middle Ages and even into the Renaissance. So much so,
in fact, that a physician philosopher named Sir Thomas Brown
actually put together a massive list of these widely believed
tall tales, and he referred to these as vulgar errors.
(07:50):
So Brown would go around testing all these absurd claims
in order to disprove them once and for all. So,
for example, one weird idea that it's bred in the
sixteen hundreds was that you could an accurate weather vane
just by hanging a dead kingfisher bird from a string.
It's as simple as that. I love art and crafts projects.
I'm guessing that didn't end wilda well. Apparently he found
(08:12):
himself a dead kingfisher one day, and he hung it
up from a beam outside, and much to his dismay,
the bird just sort of dangled and seemed to sway
at random, you know, as you'd expect from a corpse
of a dead bird. But you know, being this man
of science, Brown knew he couldn't definitively disprove this claim
with just a single dead kingfisher, So he got another one,
(08:34):
strung it up next to the first, and watched his
both birds spun aimlessly in different directions. So with that,
with that degree of science, Mango Brown was able to
say conclusively that dead kingfishers are a poor way to
determine win direction. So forget trying. This is just not
gonna work. I do like that it took uh, just
(08:54):
two dead birds to put a stop to this idea.
But you know, no one else had thought of this,
and I feel sorry for like whatever poor salesman at
the market had stocked up on baskets of kingfishers, and
I guess like Brown just ruined his entire business model.
That's all there. And other interesting cat I came across
was this guy named Johann Conrad Dipple, and he was
(09:16):
this German scientist in the late sixteen hundreds who had
actually been born in the real Castle Frankenstein, which is
kind of amazing. And of course he had a lot
of ideas. Probably his least bizarre achievement was that he
developed one of the world's first synthetic pigments, in fact,
the first. It's a dye called Prussian blue that's still
in use today. Yeah, I've heard of Prussian blue. But
I think you said least bizarre achievements. So what was
(09:38):
his most bizarre achievement? Yeah, I did because I wanted
to talk about Dipple's oil. It was supposed to be
kind of a life extending potion, but was in reality
just this like terrible, disgusting slurry made from a mix
of random animal bones and hides. It's too bad. I'm
curious that did he sell a lot of dipples oil.
Imagine it must have been a big hit with the
(09:58):
local villagers there. Yeah, you'd think so, but not so much.
In fact, Dipple was eventually run out of town because
of all these rumors that started circulating about what he
was really doing in his lab. Like one of the
rumors claimed that Dipple was a grave robber and that
he'd once tried to move a soul from one corpse
to another using just a funnel, a hose and a
bit of lubricants. You need the lubricant to get it through.
(10:21):
But yeah, I think we can both agree that that's
a bit of the suspect signs there. I mean, I
guess so I could see where they were going with that.
But but I do see what you mean about him
being a mad scientist, all right, But if you don't mind,
I kind of want to transition away from the total
crackpots and start talking about some of the scientists who
are maybe I don't know, just a little misguided instead.
And thankfully, I think I have the perfect person to
(10:43):
help us make that leap, because he really does tow
this line between those two types. And his name was
Stubborn's Firth. Isn't that a great name. It just seems
like somebody that would tow those lines full Stubbens. But
in the early nineteenth century he was training to be
a doctor in Philadelphia, and during this time Stubbins began
studying the effects of yellow fever, and that was, of
(11:03):
course a disease that had laid ways to the area's
population just a few years before this, and he had
noticed that the fever hardest hit in the summer months,
and then it would disappear almost entirely by wintertime, and
so this led him to the conclusion that all these
widely held opinions about yellow fever being contagious were completely false.
So to him, it seemed much more likely that yellow
(11:25):
fever was brought on by excessive heat and food and noise,
and all of these things were much more abundant in
the summer than they were in the winter. I like
the idea of just a lot of noise causing yellow fever.
It does sound like this guy's heart was in the
right place. Like, I know, this doesn't feel like a
sound theory, But what goes on from here? Well, this
is where Stubborns needed proof on this. So so the
(11:47):
doctor and training began a series of self experiments to
show that no matter how often he was exposed to
yellow fever, he would never catch it. And not being
the kind of guy to do anything halfway, Stubbors decided
that his best chance to ensure he was properly exposed
to the disease was to use This was the quote
from this notebook, fresh black Vomit from Yellow fever patients.
(12:10):
So this is already disgusting and I'm pretty grossed out,
but I do have to ask, like, what do you
mean by he used it? He used to how well
in all sorts of ways, and this actually gets even
more disgusting. But here the way. So first he tried
to make small cuts on his arms, and then he
would pour some of this vomit into his wounds. Next
he DAPs some of the mess directly into his eyes.
(12:32):
Then he heated some in a skillet and inhaled the fumes.
And then lastly, as if those things weren't gross enough,
he just went for it. And I'm not joking. I
think you saw this coming. He just chugged some of
the stuff, which makes me feel sick just hearing it.
But I mean, Stubbns never got sick, which, of course,
and I don't know how he would know that he
didn't get sick, because I can't imagine doing any of
(12:55):
these things and not vomiting yourself. But he took this
all as proof for his theory, so I don't understand
how any of that's possible. Like I thought yellow fever
was contagious, so it definitely has. I mean, it's highly contagious.
But as we know, the disease needs to come into
direct contact with the blood stream in order to cause
that infection. And that's likely why Stubborns observed so many
(13:15):
more cases of yellow fever in the summer. There were
just more mosquitoes around to spread the disease. So I
get that, But why didn't Stubborns get sick when he
was cutting himself in you know, like exposing that stuff
to his cuts, And I mean that that had to
get in his blood stream right, Well, normally yes, But
as it turned out in this case, most of the
patients whose samples he used were in the late stages
(13:37):
of yellow fever, and by that point they were actually
no longer contagious. Though of course, you know Stubborns didn't
know this. Well, I mean, i'd say we're firmly in
the realm of misguided experiments after that one. So I'm
actually gonna keep the ball rolling with what I hope
will be something of a palate cleanser. And this is
this crazy study I found out about mating instincts of turkeys.
I like how you're calling mating instincts of turkeys a
(13:59):
a palette, but tell me more here. Yeah, it's a
turkey and moves bush. So wild turkeys are notoriously difficult
to hunt, which is why human hunters often resort to
these lifelike decoy models of female turkeys. They use these
to lure the bigger male birds to them, and the
males don't seem to mind or even notice the difference.
(14:19):
For the most part. They're actually perfectly content to mate
with these phony birds. And that behavior is actually what
caught the attention of these two researchers at the University
of Pennsylvania. Oh wow, so we're back in Pennsylvania again. Yeah,
it's a hotbed of science. But anyway, these guys that
you pen started wondering what was the minimal stimulus for
exciting a turkey, and so to figure that out, they
(14:40):
decided to gradually remove parts from a decoy turkey until
the male inevitably lost interests. So first they removed the
tail and the tail feathers, and then the feet and
lastly the wings. But despite all of these missing appendages,
the males were still eager to meete with the decoy.
I mean, I guess they just love the personnel. And
(15:01):
eventually the researchers were down to just ahead on a stick,
and the strangest far is that the mail try keys
were still interested. Yeah, that's pretty crazy. I have to
admit I feel slightly scandalized and more than a little
concerned about what the good people of Pennsylvania are doing
with their time. All in the name of science, I guess.
But alright, well, since you open the seal on weird
(15:21):
animal studies, there's one I've been dying to tell you about. Absolutely,
But first let's take a quick break. You're listening to
part Time Genius, and we're talking about some of the
(15:42):
strangest experiments in the history of science. Now for better
Whereas many of the weirdest projects do tend to involve
animal test subjects, but rather than focusing on the more
upsetting ones where animals come to harm, instead, I want
to tell you the story of a young boy and
his adopted chimpanzee sister. And yes, I said it, his
adopted sister. Now, probably the most troubling aspect of this
(16:03):
one is that the boy's father decided to carry out
his experiment using his own son. But don't worry before
I tell you about this, the boy makes it through unharmed,
or at least more or less unharmed anyway. The father's
name was Winthrop Kellogg, and he was a psychologist who
wondered what would happen if an animal was raised by
humans as a human. This was in the early nineteen thirties,
(16:23):
so if you think about the time, then this is
when you know the Tarzan books were all the rage,
and there are also several real life accounts of feral
children who had been raised by animals, and so Kellogg
was inspired by these stories and he wanted to test
the opposite case, like, if an animal was raised as
a human, would it eventually act like a human too?
(16:44):
Oh so it's like a bizarro jungle book or like
the reverse of a Mowgli situation. Yeah. So So that
in Kellogg brought home a seven month old female champion
zee named Gua, and he and his wife, who must
have been this extremely patient woman, started raising the alongside
their ten month old son Donald. And the Kelloggs treated
their two kids exactly the same. Donald and Gua were
(17:07):
allowed to play together, they ate together. They also took
part in regular tests to track their development. For example,
there was this one cookie test where the Kelloggs hung
a cookie from a string in the middle of the room,
and then they timed how long it took the boy
and the chimp to reach it. Okay, so I mean
he was pitting a chimp against a baby, so the
chip mop the floor with him, not surprising, it was
(17:28):
no contest. In fact, Want typically outperformed Donald on just
about all the tests they took, except some of the
ones that involved language acquisition. So I know this is
supposed to be like a non upsetting study, but constantly
losing to a chimp couldn't have been good for a
kid's self esteem, right, probably not, But you know, one
downside did become clear about nine months into the experiment,
(17:51):
and and that was that baby Donald's own language skills
were not as far along as they should have been.
And looking back on this, that's probably not such a
big surprise. But it he sometimes did better than Gua
on their language based test, it really wasn't by much,
and so it started to look like, rather than Donald
having a humanizing effect on Gua, he was actually starting
to adapt some to her way instead. And the deciding
(18:13):
moment came one day when Donald let his parents know
how hungry he was by imitating the barking sounds that
Gua was making whenever she wanted. So when the Kellogg's
heard the food bark coming from their human son, they
decided then it was time to pull the plug on
the experiment. But I like that it took that much
to get them to realize maybe it wasn't a great idea. Yeah,
it seems like a smart move. But strangely enough, the
(18:35):
Kellogg's weren't the only scientists parents to use their own
kids as test subjects. So I was reading about this
other psychologist from the nineteen thirties named Clarence Luba, and
he used his own kids to determine if people learned
to laugh when tickled or if it's an innate response.
I mean, this sounds more pleasant than being pitted against
the chimp. But I mean, if you're going to use
your own kids as test subjects, at least don't be
(18:56):
creepy about it, you know. Yeah, I mean I guess
the is on your definition of creepy. Because Luba decided
that he shouldn't laugh or show a happy expression while
he was tickling his kids because that might ruin the experiment. So, uh,
you know, the idea is that they might mimic his
behavior or use it to infer the proper response is
to laugh when tickled. So just to prevent that, Luba
(19:18):
actually banned all unauthorized tickling in his household and he
institute these clinical daily tickling sessions instead. And during these
designated tickling times, uh, Luba would hide his facial expressions
behind a mask and then joylessly tickle his son. Oh,
I take it back, man, this is the creepiest thing
I've ever heard me or tickling sessions. That's just I
(19:41):
don't know, maga, It's just like deeply unnerving. Yeah. And
Luba even took this measured approach to how he tickled
his son, like first he started with a light tickle
and then he would like tickle more enthusiastically, and he
always did the same order like he um. I think
he started under the armpits and then went to the
ribs and then chin, neck, knees, feet, and uh. He
(20:02):
kept this up for a full seven months, and then
after that he repeated the experiment for another seven months
with his daughter when she was born. This is just
I don't want to hear about this one anymore because
I I guess I am curious, though, So what were
Louba's results. Well, in both cases, as you might guess,
he found that his kids spontaneously laughed when tickled, even
though they had never been shown that behavior before. So
(20:24):
it would seem that laughing when tickled really is an
innate response, and it only took weirding out a couple
of his own toddlers to figure that out. Well, I
guess it's worth it in the name of science, except
not at all. That is so creepy. All right, Well,
since we're getting into this kind of psychological territory, I
have to mention a series of studies carried out by
Dr You and Cameron, and these were in the nineteen
(20:44):
fifties and sixties. Cameron was convinced that the brain could
be reprogrammed by imposing new thought patterns on it, and
his hope was that the method could be used to
help patients with schizophrenia achieve a more clear and maybe
positive way of thinking. So the way it was supposed
to work was that the patients would wear a pair
of headphones and then they would listen to these audio
(21:05):
messages that were played over and over, sometimes for days
or or even weeks at a time, and this was
something Cameron called psychic driving, because the idea was that
repeated messages would be driven gradually into the patient's psyche.
And the press gave the method a different name, though
they actually called it beneficial brainwashing, which I mean, I
(21:25):
guess sounds like good branding at least. Yeah, I mean,
it's a bit of an oxymoron of a name. But
it didn't deter Cameron, so for over a decade he
tested his method on hundreds of unwitting patients, many of
whom didn't even have schizophrenia. In fact, even people with
minor ailments would sometimes check into the clinic where Cameron worked,
and before they knew it, they were drugged, strapped to
(21:46):
a bed, and forced to listen to loop recordings of
these aspirational messages. I mean, it's actually crazy to think
about some of these things. Yeah, it's terrifying. So what
kind of messages were they made to listen to. Well,
they were mostly your typical positive enforcement kind of stuff,
you know, like they would say things like people like
you and need you, and and you have confidence in yourself.
(22:06):
It sounds a little bit Stewart small exactly. Well, but
one time, though, Cameron put his patients into a drug
induced sleep and then made them listen to the message
that said, when you see a piece of paper, you
want to pick it up. That's all that's said. Then,
once all the patients had woken up, Cameron drove them
one by one to a gymnasium where a single piece
(22:27):
of paper was waiting for them on the floor of
the gym, and, according to report Cameron later wrote about
the experiment, most of the patients, without any prompting, spontaneously
walked over and picked up the paper. Such a dumix, man,
it feels like like you should test it with, like
putting a piece of paper and a puppy in a box.
Right right, that's a good one. You should be a scientist,
(22:49):
right Well, I basically am. But it doesn't sound like
Cameron also had like the full consent of his patients.
I mean, did his operations get shut quickly like once
people caught onto what was happening. Well you would think so,
but actually when the CIA found out what Cameron had
been up to, it actually started funding his experiments in secret,
and this move ultimately backfired. Though there was a group
(23:12):
of Cameron's former patients that decided to sue the CIA
actually for supporting his work. I see. I eventually settled
the matter out of court and Cameron was forced to
concede that his brainwatching experiments, as as he called it,
had been what did he say said, a ten year
trip down the wrong road. I guess that's one way
to put it. Yeah, I guess it's putting it lightly.
(23:35):
But cameron story actually reminds me of another psychologist who
tried to change the thought patterns with weird repeated messages
and it didn't go as planned as you might have guessed.
And I'll tell you about that in a minute, but
first we got to take another quick break. Okay, mano,
(24:01):
let's hear it. What's the strange subliminal science project that
you wanted to tell us about? Sure, so, I'm actually
gonna set the mood for this one. So the years
nineteen for you two. You're sleep in a cabin at
a summer camp in upstate New York. On all sides
of you or other teenage boys also sleeping, and just
a few feet away there's a man standing alone in
the darkness. He speaks out loud to his unconscious audience.
(24:24):
Again and again he mechanically recites the same one phrase,
my fingernails taste terribly bitter. My fingernails taste terribly bitter.
Oh man, go, I gotta stop at these. You found
this weird experiments? Are you sure this is a science
story and not just a horror story? You're creeping me
out today? I know from from what I can tell
you really was in the name of the science. Uh.
(24:46):
This guy's name was um Dr Lawrence Lesson, and that
night in the cabin he was actually conducting the sleep
learning experiment. So all of the boys have actually been
diagnosed with chronic nail biting, and the hope was that
they could be cured by you know, these nocturnal messaging.
You know, I'm trying to think about this. So you
said this was in the forties, and so I'm trying
to think of how he would have delivered these messages. So,
(25:09):
so did Lesson have to like creep over them and
repeat this phrase, you know, all night long to them?
That just seems so weird. I mean, it's not like
he could have used a phonograph or something like that, right, Yeah, well,
I mean it adds to the story. But Lesson actually
did start the study using a recorded message and he
played it like three hundred times a night for the kids.
(25:30):
But he had to take the task over himself when
his phonograph broke and it actually broke down five weeks
into his experiment. Five weeks? How long was this study
is supposed to last the whole summer? Apparently, like can
you actually imagine these boys coming back to school and
the first day and and uh and they have to
answer these questions for the classmates about how they spent
their summers and and you know, other kids would be like, oh,
(25:53):
I went to Hawaii or you know, I went to
my grandparents and they're like, I spent eight weeks in
a cabin with some weirdo telling me how bad my
fing your nail days. Oh my gosh. So so I
do have to know. I mean, that sounds terrible, But
was the experiment of success, like did the kids stop
biting their nails? Kind of? I mean, at the end
of the summer, Lession determined that the boys had been cured,
(26:13):
which made it seem like his sleep learning techniques had
some real merit. But unfortunately, other researchers looked into it,
and they tested his method and you know, one study
in ninety six track participants brain activity to make sure
they were totally asleep before playing this anti nail binding message,
and in that case, like the unconscious messaging didn't have
any effect at all. So the whole idea was that,
(26:35):
you know, those had probably kicked the habit because they
were still someone awake during those readings. Yeah, yeah, but
I guess beneficial brainwashing really does work. That's uh, that's
interesting and weird. You know, one kind of weird experiment
we haven't talked much about today are the government funded
kind of experiments. And you know, we did cover some
of these back in our episode on Bizarre government investments.
(26:56):
But I came across another one this week, and it's
just too good to share. And it's called Bird's Eye bomb,
and it was developed during World War two by the
famous psychologist and behavior's named BF Skinner. Now, the idea
here amounted to what was basically a pigeon guided missile.
And when you know what, the inspiration came to Skinner
one day when he was watching a nearby flock of pigeons.
(27:18):
As he later wrote of this sense and and he says,
suddenly I saw them as devices with excellent vision and
extraordinary maneuverability, could they not guide a missile? So? I mean,
who hasn't seen a flock of pigeons and thought that?
I have a little confused that, Like, how exactly is
this supposed to work? All right? Well, Skinner trained the
(27:39):
pigeons to peck carefully at chosen images, like an enemy
battleship for example. And you know, once the birds had
committed these targets to memory, Skinner would put them in
these custom made missile nose cones. And so the makeshift
cockpit included a little plastic screen and they used mirrors
for this, and then there would be an image of
the missile's flight path that could be projected onto it.
(28:00):
So by pecking at the screen, the pigeons were able
to alter the coordinates and basically by doing this, they
would steer it toward a specific target. I mean, that's
that's both ingenious and insane. And you know, this idea
of like kama kaze pigeons sounds so ridiculous, But I mean,
is there anybody it could really work? So? Surprisingly, yes,
(28:21):
I mean, preliminary tests proved the pigeons were top notch
pilots and plenty of scientists endorsed the project in light
of those early results, but in the end, the military
just couldn't stomach the thought of funding such a silly
sounding project. So the cut Skinner's funding completely in October
of four. And it's just a shame because Top Gun
could have been a totally different movie if you think
(28:42):
about it. I know, the animated Disney movie Top Gun
would have been Okay, So you know you sneaked in
another animal based study, and so I'm going to do
the same and tell you about this fateful experiment that
sent the first humble tart de grade to space. All Right,
I feel like I've seen tartar grades and the news
or reported on a lot in recent years. But remind
(29:04):
me of what that is because it rings a bell
as an animal, but it also just sounds like something
that might be from like Doctor Who or something. M Yeah, So,
targe grades are these microscopic, eight legged potato looking things.
They look like little monster potatoes. Sometimes they were called
water bears or moss piglets, and you can actually find
them in just about every habitat on Earth. You can
(29:26):
find them on like mountaintops, rainforest, the bottom of lags
even even in Antarctica, which is pretty incredible. But you know,
speaking of doctor who, because you mentioned it, the team
behind the study must have been fans, because they actually
named their experiment targe grades in space or tartis. Actually,
I just pulled up a picture and they do look
both cute and freaky, and it's crazy that they're only
(29:48):
like a millimeter big. But so you said, we shot
these things into space for some reason, Yeah, a team
of European researchers wanted to test just how resilient these
tartar grades really are, because you can probably tell from
that list of habitats that you know, they're hardy creatures
and they can survive temperatures as low as negative three
twenty eight degrees fahrenheit or as high as three hundred
(30:09):
degrees fahrenheit. They can also stand up to pressures as
powerful as six thousand times that of the Earth's atmosphere,
and they can even survive doses of radiation that are
thousands of times stronger than it would take to kill
a humans. So clearly they're super tough creatures, and it
actually turns out there so tough they can even survive
exposure to the vacuum of outer space. Wow. So so
(30:31):
researchers just flew a bunch of these what you what
do you call them? I like the name of moss picklets.
I think that was my favorite. So they flew these
things into space and just like chuck them out the
airlock or what Yeah, I mean the the approach was
a little more nuanced than that. So first they dehydrated
the targerets and uh, you know, that makes them enter
this state of hibernation where all their metabolic activity drops
(30:52):
to about point one percent of normal levels. And then
once they're in this protective state, the researchers exposed one
group of water bears to the acumum space and another
to both the vacuum space and this immense radiation from
the Sun. And after full ten days of this, right
ten days, the target grades were brought back to Earth
and rehydrated, and amazingly, sixty percent of the targe grades
(31:15):
exposed only to outer space survived, and even among the
ones who were also exposed to solar radiation, a handful
were successfully revived. And the craziest part, some of these
even went on to produce healthy offspring. So those things
are pretty much unstoppable. But you know, I actually have
my own weird space experiment to share, and I happen
to think it blows yours away. Man, I just wanted
(31:36):
to get heads up on this. And this. This comes
from when a two man crew took the Gemini three
on a several trips around the Earth's orbit, and one
of the astronauts on that mission, John Young, was apparently
not a fan of the kind of the standard food
from a tube that NASA was typically providing them, because
once the pair reached orbit, Young revealed that he had
smuggled aboard a contraband corned beef sandwich in to his
(32:00):
back pocket. I mean, I love the story. I know
the story, but I'm not really sure you can call
it an experiment. I mean it sounds more like a
great anecdote about a hungry astronaut. I don't know, man,
Go actually, let let me help me read this transcript.
I've got this for you. I want you to help
me out here and you'll see what I mean by this.
So I'm gonna be John Young, and you're going to
(32:20):
be Gus Grissome, the co pilot. Are you ready to
do this? Yeah, I've got the script here go, go
for it. It's your line. First, What is it a
corn beef sandwich? Where did that come from? I brought
it with me. Let's see how it tastes, smells, doesn't it.
That's it. That's the whole. The whole incident lasted like
thirty seconds, including the time I know, but it was
(32:43):
worth it because you know, there was thirty seconds, and
that included the time it took the nibble the sandwich
before Young tucked it back into his flight suit. But see,
they wanted to see what it tasted like. That's the experiment.
Does a corn beef sandwich taste and smell the same
in space as it does on Earth? And Young suffered
for his science too. After the mission. He was sternly
chastised by his superiors at NASA, though I guess they
(33:06):
didn't come down on too hard because he was still
permitted to land on the Moon as part of the
Apollo sixteen mission. Well, I am glad that an illicit
sandwich incident didn't cost him his career. Well all right, Well,
I can tell from the smoke coming out of Tristan's
potato that we're running short on time. I do have
a few more weird experiments I wanted to cover, though, well,
thankfully that's exactly what the factops. BOYD, why don't we
(33:35):
start with an experiment by the Swedish playwright August Strenberg.
Strendberg wasn't a scientist, but he certainly had some ideas,
and one of those was his belief that plants had
nervous systems and for some reason botanist had just overlooked it. Anyway,
he was determined to show everyone that plants could feel things.
So during his walks around town, he would take out
(33:55):
some morphine and you know the way we all carry morphine,
I guess in our back pockets, so that he would
inject whatever he saw to see how it would react.
And one day he was arrested for injecting an apple
with the drug. But when he explained he was just
trying to get the apple high in the name of science,
the officer figured he was just a sweet lunatic and
not someone trying to go around poisoning the city and
let him go. So, you know, I've always heard that
(34:19):
thing about how a soul weighs twenty one grahams, which
is odd, like, why does that have to be in
the metric system we live in America about it, right,
which should be like three of announced. But anyway, I
was curious where the idea came from, and apparently it
goes back to to this Massachusetts doctors, this guy named
Duncan McDougal, and so this actually comes from Discover magazine.
(34:41):
But to figure it out, McDougall made this bed fitted
with scales, and then he convinced a bunch of terminally
ill patients and this is pretty crazy that they should
make it their literal deathbed. And then he was actually
pretty meticulous about it. So this is from the magazine quote.
He recorded not only each patient's exact time of death,
but also his total time on the bed, as well
as any changes in weight that occurred around the moment
(35:03):
of expiration. He even factored losses of bodily fluids like
sweat and urine and gases like oxygen and nitrogen into
his calculations. Of course, you know the conclusion right like
after the soul escaped the body, the people weighed twenty
one grams less. Okay, I've got one about a guy
named Hitting Brand, and he really wanted to get wealthy,
and he believed he had a Scrooge McDuck wade to
(35:25):
kind of get there, and that was through p Now.
In sixteen sixty nine, the German alchemist apparently had stalked
about fifteen hundred gallons worth of urine in his basement.
That is just so weird, but growth he was convinced
he could spin it into goal. Of course he couldn't,
but his experiments did lead to one interesting discovery. After
(35:46):
boiling one sample, he noticed a bit of unusual glowing liquid,
which is how he ended up discovering phosphorus. Oh that's amazing.
So you'll be happy to know that I didn't just
look up what turkeys are attracted to. I also looked
into chick in preferences. And according to one study, chickens
don't like ugly people. And basically the scientist Dr Stefano
(36:07):
Garlanda at the Zoology Institution of Stockholm University, he was
trying trying to understand whether physical attraction is inherited due
to genes or learned. So he tested it the way
any of us would. He took some I guess libidinous chickens,
and these birds were just hot to trot or what. Yeah,
they were definitely quote excited and and uh. He showed
(36:29):
them photos of people to see which ones they wanted
to meet with and which ones they had picked. So
care Landa took photos of thirty five males and females
and these are humans, and they mashed them into these
digital picks of these very average looking people and male
birds mostly pecked photos of women. Hens mostly pecked photos
of men. And then Geir Landa gave them this other task. Right,
He created another set of more faces, and this time
(36:52):
he asked college students to rate the faces on attractiveness.
So percent of the time the chickens actually pecked the
more attractive face. Oh wow, that's that's pretty interesting. Or well,
here's the story I learned from cracked, and it asked
the important question what happens when you get leeches drunk?
You know, we've all wondered this. The idea was that
(37:12):
you can actually improve the rate that leeches sucked blood
if you can just get them a little bit loose beforehand.
So researchers from Norway dipped a bunch of leeches in
guinness and also smeared some in garlic and others in
sour cream. Such a weird experiment, and I'm guessing it
wasn't just the leeches drinking during this experiment, So what happened, Well,
the drunk leeches are not good at sucking blood. I
(37:34):
don't know why this would come as a surprise to anybody.
They just kind of wiggled and couldn't focus. They fell
off the arms, which is just I wish I had
a video of this experiment because it just sounds so weird.
The sour cream leeches fared better with slightly better sucking abilities,
and the garlic coated leeches, like any good vampire, garlic
was their kryptonite. They actually died. That's pretty amazing, and
(37:56):
I'm actually glad we started with rats on cocaine and
ended with leech is on a bender because science is
great and drunken science might even be better. But I'm
gonna give you today's uh today's trophy. Well, thank you,
it's an honor. Now. I'm sure there's so many great experiments.
There were many we couldn't include that we had looked into,
but we'd love to hear from you. If there are
ones that you guys want us to hear about, feel
(38:17):
free to email us. Part Time Genius at how stuff
Works dot com. You can also call us on our
seven fact hot line that's one eight four four pt
Genius or has always hit us up on Facebook or Twitter.
But thanks so much for listening. Thanks again for listening.
(38:44):
Part Time Genius is a production of How Stuff Works
and wouldn't be possible without several brilliant people who do
the important things we couldn't even begin to understand. Tristan
McNeil does the editing thing. Noel Brown made the theme
song and does the MIXI mixy sound thing. Jerry Rowland
does the exact producer thing. Gay Bluesiers our lead researcher,
with support from the Research Army, including Austin Thompson, Nolan
Brown and Lucas Adams and Eves Jeff Cook gets the
(39:06):
show to your ears. Good job, Eves. If you like
what you heard, we hope you'll subscribe, And if you
really really like what you've heard, maybe you could leave
a good review for us. We do. We forget Jason Jason,
who
Guess what will? What's that? Mango? So have you heard
of this experiment from Albany Medical College where they tried
to figure out whether rats like jazz or classical music more?
I don't know how I haven't heard about this because
it seems like a really important experiment, and actually I
have to meet I am curious so so so which
one do they like? More? So? The scientists played for
a lease on loop for ninety minutes, and then they'd
(00:21):
switched to Miles Davis and his song four, So they
just go from Ford for at least to four. And
of course they discovered that the rats like silence better
than continuous music. But when they had to choose, the
rats like Beethoven more than hard bop. And I guess
that makes sense. If we're talking about on repeat and
they're having to hear this over and over, I guess
it's a little more soothing, right, Yeah. But the experimenters
(00:44):
weren't done then, so I have no idea why they
did this. They injected the rats with cocaine after this
for seven straight days, and once the rats had this
cocaine just racing through their system, they couldn't get enough.
Miles Davis also makes sense fairly. Science tells us that
coked up rats really love jazz. But there's a whole
(01:07):
world of questionable science experiments, from the weird to the
funny to the seriously ill advised. And that's what today's
show is all about. Let's dig in a their podcast. Listeners,
(01:37):
Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as
always I'm joined by my good friend man Guesh Ticketer
and on the other side of the soundproof glass, putting
his good name on the line for the sake of
science conducting what is we assume the first ever scientific
attempt to bring a potato back to life. That's our
friend and producer Tristan McNeil, a potato back to life. Mano,
this is big science. I saw the potatoes, I saw
(01:59):
the labco I had no idea what was going on there.
I think that's what the defibrillator is for. And you
might be wondering how you can tell the difference between
a live and a dead potato. Well, those are all
heavy questions, and hopefully Tristan's work will help shed some
light on just a few of those. It may be
two over our heads. We'll see most of what Tristan
does is But anyway, I know this experiment sounds ridiculous,
(02:22):
but honestly, everything on today's show sounds a little ridiculous.
So we'll dig into some of the weirdest, most questionable
science experiments in history. Now, Mango, I know, for a
while as a kid you wanted to be a scientist,
and I've heard you talk about some of the experiments
you conducted. So did you come up with any terrible
experiments along the way? So many? I mean, you know,
my dad's a scientist, and he's a good one. So
(02:44):
we test things and I tell him about inventions, ideas
for inventions I had, Like I had an idea for
a d microwave, and the whole idea was that, like
you could cool down a hot bagel fast. And yeah,
you tell me like why it would or wouldn't work,
or what I'd have to think about. But I think
the biggest failure I had as a kid was in
second grade and my friends and I were at the
(03:05):
bus stop and we always wanted a day off from school,
you know, especially when the weather was nice, because you
want to stay home and play and whatever. So I
hatched this amazing scheme, like our our friend Kristen had
access to a ton of gum for some reason, and
I knew that gum on the ground is sticky when
you step on it. And I don't remember how we
calculated this out, but there were drawings and some terrible
(03:27):
math involved, but we figured that if we could get
a big enough wad of sticky gum in the right place,
the school bus tire would probably stick to it and
get stuck there for the day and we wouldn't have
to go to school. I really want to hear that
this worked, but I'm going to guess that maybe this
didn't work. Yeah, of course not. I mean, my calculations
were off, I guess. And but the plan was like
(03:48):
so elaborate. We we planned about it, we talked about it,
We made this giant wad of gum, and then we
placed it in what we thought was going to be
the perfect spot. And then the school bus tire didn't
even roll over and so super anti climatic, and we
sort of like deflatedly walked onto the school bus. But uh,
now that I think about, the gum was also care free,
(04:09):
so it wasn't really like a sticky type of gum.
That was your problem because care Free was it's sugarless, right, Yeah,
but I mean you go to war with the gum
you have and it was not a great day for science.
All right, Well, today's show is all about odds science experiments,
and just because their bizarre doesn't mean we should automatically
discount them. In fact, I was reading this article by
(04:30):
Alex Boss and he wrote a great book about odds
science experiments, and there's a section where Alex explains why
he first got into weird projects and and why he
believes they should still be thought of as worthwhile. So
I just want to read a bit from this. So
here's what he says. I confess I had no profound
intellectual motive at first. I simply found them fascinating. They
filled me with disbelief, astonishment, discussed, and best of all laughter.
(04:54):
But with hindsight, perhaps there is a deeper message. These
experiments are not the work of cranks. All were performed
by honest, hard working scientists who were not prepared to
accept a common sense explanation of how the world works.
Sometimes such single mindedness leads to brilliant discoveries. At other
times it can end up closer to madness. Unfortunately, there's
no way of knowing in advance where the journey will lead. Yeah,
(05:17):
I mean, that's certainly something to keep in mind as
we go along. But while it might be true that
none of the people that Alex talked about were crackpots,
some of the ones I want to talk about definitely work.
So this includes the first guy we've gone on the list,
a Renaissance era physician and alchemist named Paracelsus. Now Parasulsis
is known for doing some of the earliest research in
toxicology and also psychotherapy, which are I guess both weird
(05:39):
in their own right, but without doubt his strongest claim
to theme was his account of how to grow your
own homunculous. To grow your own homunculous, mega can grow
your own I do want to confess I'm a little
rusty on my pseudoscience lingo from what you said the right. So, so,
what exactly is a humunculous. It's a mythological creature. Apparently,
(06:02):
parasols Is believed in all sorts of those, including giants
and wood nymphs. But homunculus was basically like a tiny
living human the size of a doll or something and
Paracelsis actually claimed to have made his own, which he
said was about a foot tall. Right, And you said
this man was a doctor, right, Yeah, I mean it
was easier to get into medical school back then. Some
(06:24):
people thought he was a medical genius. Others thought he
was more of this loud mouth drunk type. I'm guessing
the truth was somewhere in between. But these are actually
the instructions Paracelsus has laid out to create your own
little homunculus. So here we go. Let the seat of
a man by itself be putrified in a gored glass
and sealed up in horse done for the space of
(06:44):
forty days, until so long as it begins to be alive,
move and stir. After this time, it will be something
like a man, yet transparent and without a body. Now,
after this, if it be every day warily, imprudently nourished
and fed with man's blood, and be kept for the
ace of forty weeks and a constant equal heat of
horse dung, it will become a true and living infant.
(07:07):
You know what, just hearing this, it kind of makes
me want to go back and watch those old s
n L skits where Steve Martin played the medieval barber,
because it sounds like pretty similar advice. And you know,
I admire paracelsis ingenuity, and obviously at the time they
had a much different set of knowledge. But I feel
like it might be smarter for the human race to
stick with the you know, the old fashioned horse dung
(07:28):
freeway to make a true and living infant. But anyway,
you know, word of crazy experiments like this and these
medical fallacies, they got passed around a lot during the
Middle Ages and even into the Renaissance. So much so,
in fact, that a physician philosopher named Sir Thomas Brown
actually put together a massive list of these widely believed
tall tales, and he referred to these as vulgar errors.
(07:50):
So Brown would go around testing all these absurd claims
in order to disprove them once and for all. So,
for example, one weird idea that it's bred in the
sixteen hundreds was that you could an accurate weather vane
just by hanging a dead kingfisher bird from a string.
It's as simple as that. I love art and crafts projects.
I'm guessing that didn't end wilda well. Apparently he found
(08:12):
himself a dead kingfisher one day, and he hung it
up from a beam outside, and much to his dismay,
the bird just sort of dangled and seemed to sway
at random, you know, as you'd expect from a corpse
of a dead bird. But you know, being this man
of science, Brown knew he couldn't definitively disprove this claim
with just a single dead kingfisher, So he got another one,
(08:34):
strung it up next to the first, and watched his
both birds spun aimlessly in different directions. So with that,
with that degree of science, Mango Brown was able to
say conclusively that dead kingfishers are a poor way to
determine win direction. So forget trying. This is just not
gonna work. I do like that it took uh, just
(08:54):
two dead birds to put a stop to this idea.
But you know, no one else had thought of this,
and I feel sorry for like whatever poor salesman at
the market had stocked up on baskets of kingfishers, and
I guess like Brown just ruined his entire business model.
That's all there. And other interesting cat I came across
was this guy named Johann Conrad Dipple, and he was
(09:16):
this German scientist in the late sixteen hundreds who had
actually been born in the real Castle Frankenstein, which is
kind of amazing. And of course he had a lot
of ideas. Probably his least bizarre achievement was that he
developed one of the world's first synthetic pigments, in fact,
the first. It's a dye called Prussian blue that's still
in use today. Yeah, I've heard of Prussian blue. But
I think you said least bizarre achievements. So what was
(09:38):
his most bizarre achievement? Yeah, I did because I wanted
to talk about Dipple's oil. It was supposed to be
kind of a life extending potion, but was in reality
just this like terrible, disgusting slurry made from a mix
of random animal bones and hides. It's too bad. I'm
curious that did he sell a lot of dipples oil.
Imagine it must have been a big hit with the
(09:58):
local villagers there. Yeah, you'd think so, but not so much.
In fact, Dipple was eventually run out of town because
of all these rumors that started circulating about what he
was really doing in his lab. Like one of the
rumors claimed that Dipple was a grave robber and that
he'd once tried to move a soul from one corpse
to another using just a funnel, a hose and a
bit of lubricants. You need the lubricant to get it through.
(10:21):
But yeah, I think we can both agree that that's
a bit of the suspect signs there. I mean, I
guess so I could see where they were going with that.
But but I do see what you mean about him
being a mad scientist, all right, But if you don't mind,
I kind of want to transition away from the total
crackpots and start talking about some of the scientists who
are maybe I don't know, just a little misguided instead.
And thankfully, I think I have the perfect person to
(10:43):
help us make that leap, because he really does tow
this line between those two types. And his name was
Stubborn's Firth. Isn't that a great name. It just seems
like somebody that would tow those lines full Stubbens. But
in the early nineteenth century he was training to be
a doctor in Philadelphia, and during this time Stubbins began
studying the effects of yellow fever, and that was, of
(11:03):
course a disease that had laid ways to the area's
population just a few years before this, and he had
noticed that the fever hardest hit in the summer months,
and then it would disappear almost entirely by wintertime, and
so this led him to the conclusion that all these
widely held opinions about yellow fever being contagious were completely false.
So to him, it seemed much more likely that yellow
(11:25):
fever was brought on by excessive heat and food and noise,
and all of these things were much more abundant in
the summer than they were in the winter. I like
the idea of just a lot of noise causing yellow fever.
It does sound like this guy's heart was in the
right place. Like, I know, this doesn't feel like a
sound theory, But what goes on from here? Well, this
is where Stubborns needed proof on this. So so the
(11:47):
doctor and training began a series of self experiments to
show that no matter how often he was exposed to
yellow fever, he would never catch it. And not being
the kind of guy to do anything halfway, Stubbors decided
that his best chance to ensure he was properly exposed
to the disease was to use This was the quote
from this notebook, fresh black Vomit from Yellow fever patients.
(12:10):
So this is already disgusting and I'm pretty grossed out,
but I do have to ask, like, what do you
mean by he used it? He used to how well
in all sorts of ways, and this actually gets even
more disgusting. But here the way. So first he tried
to make small cuts on his arms, and then he
would pour some of this vomit into his wounds. Next
he DAPs some of the mess directly into his eyes.
(12:32):
Then he heated some in a skillet and inhaled the fumes.
And then lastly, as if those things weren't gross enough,
he just went for it. And I'm not joking. I
think you saw this coming. He just chugged some of
the stuff, which makes me feel sick just hearing it.
But I mean, Stubbns never got sick, which, of course,
and I don't know how he would know that he
didn't get sick, because I can't imagine doing any of
(12:55):
these things and not vomiting yourself. But he took this
all as proof for his theory, so I don't understand
how any of that's possible. Like I thought yellow fever
was contagious, so it definitely has. I mean, it's highly contagious.
But as we know, the disease needs to come into
direct contact with the blood stream in order to cause
that infection. And that's likely why Stubborns observed so many
(13:15):
more cases of yellow fever in the summer. There were
just more mosquitoes around to spread the disease. So I
get that, But why didn't Stubborns get sick when he
was cutting himself in you know, like exposing that stuff
to his cuts, And I mean that that had to
get in his blood stream right, Well, normally yes, But
as it turned out in this case, most of the
patients whose samples he used were in the late stages
(13:37):
of yellow fever, and by that point they were actually
no longer contagious. Though of course, you know Stubborns didn't
know this. Well, I mean, i'd say we're firmly in
the realm of misguided experiments after that one. So I'm
actually gonna keep the ball rolling with what I hope
will be something of a palate cleanser. And this is
this crazy study I found out about mating instincts of turkeys.
I like how you're calling mating instincts of turkeys a
(13:59):
a palette, but tell me more here. Yeah, it's a
turkey and moves bush. So wild turkeys are notoriously difficult
to hunt, which is why human hunters often resort to
these lifelike decoy models of female turkeys. They use these
to lure the bigger male birds to them, and the
males don't seem to mind or even notice the difference.
(14:19):
For the most part. They're actually perfectly content to mate
with these phony birds. And that behavior is actually what
caught the attention of these two researchers at the University
of Pennsylvania. Oh wow, so we're back in Pennsylvania again. Yeah,
it's a hotbed of science. But anyway, these guys that
you pen started wondering what was the minimal stimulus for
exciting a turkey, and so to figure that out, they
(14:40):
decided to gradually remove parts from a decoy turkey until
the male inevitably lost interests. So first they removed the
tail and the tail feathers, and then the feet and
lastly the wings. But despite all of these missing appendages,
the males were still eager to meete with the decoy.
I mean, I guess they just love the personnel. And
(15:01):
eventually the researchers were down to just ahead on a stick,
and the strangest far is that the mail try keys
were still interested. Yeah, that's pretty crazy. I have to
admit I feel slightly scandalized and more than a little
concerned about what the good people of Pennsylvania are doing
with their time. All in the name of science, I guess.
But alright, well, since you open the seal on weird
(15:21):
animal studies, there's one I've been dying to tell you about. Absolutely,
But first let's take a quick break. You're listening to
part Time Genius, and we're talking about some of the
(15:42):
strangest experiments in the history of science. Now for better
Whereas many of the weirdest projects do tend to involve
animal test subjects, but rather than focusing on the more
upsetting ones where animals come to harm, instead, I want
to tell you the story of a young boy and
his adopted chimpanzee sister. And yes, I said it, his
adopted sister. Now, probably the most troubling aspect of this
(16:03):
one is that the boy's father decided to carry out
his experiment using his own son. But don't worry before
I tell you about this, the boy makes it through unharmed,
or at least more or less unharmed anyway. The father's
name was Winthrop Kellogg, and he was a psychologist who
wondered what would happen if an animal was raised by
humans as a human. This was in the early nineteen thirties,
(16:23):
so if you think about the time, then this is
when you know the Tarzan books were all the rage,
and there are also several real life accounts of feral
children who had been raised by animals, and so Kellogg
was inspired by these stories and he wanted to test
the opposite case, like, if an animal was raised as
a human, would it eventually act like a human too?
(16:44):
Oh so it's like a bizarro jungle book or like
the reverse of a Mowgli situation. Yeah. So So that
in Kellogg brought home a seven month old female champion
zee named Gua, and he and his wife, who must
have been this extremely patient woman, started raising the alongside
their ten month old son Donald. And the Kelloggs treated
their two kids exactly the same. Donald and Gua were
(17:07):
allowed to play together, they ate together. They also took
part in regular tests to track their development. For example,
there was this one cookie test where the Kelloggs hung
a cookie from a string in the middle of the room,
and then they timed how long it took the boy
and the chimp to reach it. Okay, so I mean
he was pitting a chimp against a baby, so the
chip mop the floor with him, not surprising, it was
(17:28):
no contest. In fact, Want typically outperformed Donald on just
about all the tests they took, except some of the
ones that involved language acquisition. So I know this is
supposed to be like a non upsetting study, but constantly
losing to a chimp couldn't have been good for a
kid's self esteem, right, probably not, But you know, one
downside did become clear about nine months into the experiment,
(17:51):
and and that was that baby Donald's own language skills
were not as far along as they should have been.
And looking back on this, that's probably not such a
big surprise. But it he sometimes did better than Gua
on their language based test, it really wasn't by much,
and so it started to look like, rather than Donald
having a humanizing effect on Gua, he was actually starting
to adapt some to her way instead. And the deciding
(18:13):
moment came one day when Donald let his parents know
how hungry he was by imitating the barking sounds that
Gua was making whenever she wanted. So when the Kellogg's
heard the food bark coming from their human son, they
decided then it was time to pull the plug on
the experiment. But I like that it took that much
to get them to realize maybe it wasn't a great idea. Yeah,
it seems like a smart move. But strangely enough, the
(18:35):
Kellogg's weren't the only scientists parents to use their own
kids as test subjects. So I was reading about this
other psychologist from the nineteen thirties named Clarence Luba, and
he used his own kids to determine if people learned
to laugh when tickled or if it's an innate response.
I mean, this sounds more pleasant than being pitted against
the chimp. But I mean, if you're going to use
your own kids as test subjects, at least don't be
(18:56):
creepy about it, you know. Yeah, I mean I guess
the is on your definition of creepy. Because Luba decided
that he shouldn't laugh or show a happy expression while
he was tickling his kids because that might ruin the experiment. So, uh,
you know, the idea is that they might mimic his
behavior or use it to infer the proper response is
to laugh when tickled. So just to prevent that, Luba
(19:18):
actually banned all unauthorized tickling in his household and he
institute these clinical daily tickling sessions instead. And during these
designated tickling times, uh, Luba would hide his facial expressions
behind a mask and then joylessly tickle his son. Oh,
I take it back, man, this is the creepiest thing
I've ever heard me or tickling sessions. That's just I
(19:41):
don't know, maga, It's just like deeply unnerving. Yeah. And
Luba even took this measured approach to how he tickled
his son, like first he started with a light tickle
and then he would like tickle more enthusiastically, and he
always did the same order like he um. I think
he started under the armpits and then went to the
ribs and then chin, neck, knees, feet, and uh. He
(20:02):
kept this up for a full seven months, and then
after that he repeated the experiment for another seven months
with his daughter when she was born. This is just
I don't want to hear about this one anymore because
I I guess I am curious, though, So what were
Louba's results. Well, in both cases, as you might guess,
he found that his kids spontaneously laughed when tickled, even
though they had never been shown that behavior before. So
(20:24):
it would seem that laughing when tickled really is an
innate response, and it only took weirding out a couple
of his own toddlers to figure that out. Well, I
guess it's worth it in the name of science, except
not at all. That is so creepy. All right, Well,
since we're getting into this kind of psychological territory, I
have to mention a series of studies carried out by
Dr You and Cameron, and these were in the nineteen
(20:44):
fifties and sixties. Cameron was convinced that the brain could
be reprogrammed by imposing new thought patterns on it, and
his hope was that the method could be used to
help patients with schizophrenia achieve a more clear and maybe
positive way of thinking. So the way it was supposed
to work was that the patients would wear a pair
of headphones and then they would listen to these audio
(21:05):
messages that were played over and over, sometimes for days
or or even weeks at a time, and this was
something Cameron called psychic driving, because the idea was that
repeated messages would be driven gradually into the patient's psyche.
And the press gave the method a different name, though
they actually called it beneficial brainwashing, which I mean, I
(21:25):
guess sounds like good branding at least. Yeah, I mean,
it's a bit of an oxymoron of a name. But
it didn't deter Cameron, so for over a decade he
tested his method on hundreds of unwitting patients, many of
whom didn't even have schizophrenia. In fact, even people with
minor ailments would sometimes check into the clinic where Cameron worked,
and before they knew it, they were drugged, strapped to
(21:46):
a bed, and forced to listen to loop recordings of
these aspirational messages. I mean, it's actually crazy to think
about some of these things. Yeah, it's terrifying. So what
kind of messages were they made to listen to. Well,
they were mostly your typical positive enforcement kind of stuff,
you know, like they would say things like people like
you and need you, and and you have confidence in yourself.
(22:06):
It sounds a little bit Stewart small exactly. Well, but
one time, though, Cameron put his patients into a drug
induced sleep and then made them listen to the message
that said, when you see a piece of paper, you
want to pick it up. That's all that's said. Then,
once all the patients had woken up, Cameron drove them
one by one to a gymnasium where a single piece
(22:27):
of paper was waiting for them on the floor of
the gym, and, according to report Cameron later wrote about
the experiment, most of the patients, without any prompting, spontaneously
walked over and picked up the paper. Such a dumix, man,
it feels like like you should test it with, like
putting a piece of paper and a puppy in a box.
Right right, that's a good one. You should be a scientist,
(22:49):
right Well, I basically am. But it doesn't sound like
Cameron also had like the full consent of his patients.
I mean, did his operations get shut quickly like once
people caught onto what was happening. Well you would think so,
but actually when the CIA found out what Cameron had
been up to, it actually started funding his experiments in secret,
and this move ultimately backfired. Though there was a group
(23:12):
of Cameron's former patients that decided to sue the CIA
actually for supporting his work. I see. I eventually settled
the matter out of court and Cameron was forced to
concede that his brainwatching experiments, as as he called it,
had been what did he say said, a ten year
trip down the wrong road. I guess that's one way
to put it. Yeah, I guess it's putting it lightly.
(23:35):
But cameron story actually reminds me of another psychologist who
tried to change the thought patterns with weird repeated messages
and it didn't go as planned as you might have guessed.
And I'll tell you about that in a minute, but
first we got to take another quick break. Okay, mano,
(24:01):
let's hear it. What's the strange subliminal science project that
you wanted to tell us about? Sure, so, I'm actually
gonna set the mood for this one. So the years
nineteen for you two. You're sleep in a cabin at
a summer camp in upstate New York. On all sides
of you or other teenage boys also sleeping, and just
a few feet away there's a man standing alone in
the darkness. He speaks out loud to his unconscious audience.
(24:24):
Again and again he mechanically recites the same one phrase,
my fingernails taste terribly bitter. My fingernails taste terribly bitter.
Oh man, go, I gotta stop at these. You found
this weird experiments? Are you sure this is a science
story and not just a horror story? You're creeping me
out today? I know from from what I can tell
you really was in the name of the science. Uh.
(24:46):
This guy's name was um Dr Lawrence Lesson, and that
night in the cabin he was actually conducting the sleep
learning experiment. So all of the boys have actually been
diagnosed with chronic nail biting, and the hope was that
they could be cured by you know, these nocturnal messaging.
You know, I'm trying to think about this. So you
said this was in the forties, and so I'm trying
to think of how he would have delivered these messages. So,
(25:09):
so did Lesson have to like creep over them and
repeat this phrase, you know, all night long to them?
That just seems so weird. I mean, it's not like
he could have used a phonograph or something like that, right, Yeah, well,
I mean it adds to the story. But Lesson actually
did start the study using a recorded message and he
played it like three hundred times a night for the kids.
(25:30):
But he had to take the task over himself when
his phonograph broke and it actually broke down five weeks
into his experiment. Five weeks? How long was this study
is supposed to last the whole summer? Apparently, like can
you actually imagine these boys coming back to school and
the first day and and uh and they have to
answer these questions for the classmates about how they spent
their summers and and you know, other kids would be like, oh,
(25:53):
I went to Hawaii or you know, I went to
my grandparents and they're like, I spent eight weeks in
a cabin with some weirdo telling me how bad my
fing your nail days. Oh my gosh. So so I
do have to know. I mean, that sounds terrible, But
was the experiment of success, like did the kids stop
biting their nails? Kind of? I mean, at the end
of the summer, Lession determined that the boys had been cured,
(26:13):
which made it seem like his sleep learning techniques had
some real merit. But unfortunately, other researchers looked into it,
and they tested his method and you know, one study
in ninety six track participants brain activity to make sure
they were totally asleep before playing this anti nail binding message,
and in that case, like the unconscious messaging didn't have
any effect at all. So the whole idea was that,
(26:35):
you know, those had probably kicked the habit because they
were still someone awake during those readings. Yeah, yeah, but
I guess beneficial brainwashing really does work. That's uh, that's
interesting and weird. You know, one kind of weird experiment
we haven't talked much about today are the government funded
kind of experiments. And you know, we did cover some
of these back in our episode on Bizarre government investments.
(26:56):
But I came across another one this week, and it's
just too good to share. And it's called Bird's Eye bomb,
and it was developed during World War two by the
famous psychologist and behavior's named BF Skinner. Now, the idea
here amounted to what was basically a pigeon guided missile.
And when you know what, the inspiration came to Skinner
one day when he was watching a nearby flock of pigeons.
(27:18):
As he later wrote of this sense and and he says,
suddenly I saw them as devices with excellent vision and
extraordinary maneuverability, could they not guide a missile? So? I mean,
who hasn't seen a flock of pigeons and thought that?
I have a little confused that, Like, how exactly is
this supposed to work? All right? Well, Skinner trained the
(27:39):
pigeons to peck carefully at chosen images, like an enemy
battleship for example. And you know, once the birds had
committed these targets to memory, Skinner would put them in
these custom made missile nose cones. And so the makeshift
cockpit included a little plastic screen and they used mirrors
for this, and then there would be an image of
the missile's flight path that could be projected onto it.
(28:00):
So by pecking at the screen, the pigeons were able
to alter the coordinates and basically by doing this, they
would steer it toward a specific target. I mean, that's
that's both ingenious and insane. And you know, this idea
of like kama kaze pigeons sounds so ridiculous, But I mean,
is there anybody it could really work? So? Surprisingly, yes,
(28:21):
I mean, preliminary tests proved the pigeons were top notch
pilots and plenty of scientists endorsed the project in light
of those early results, but in the end, the military
just couldn't stomach the thought of funding such a silly
sounding project. So the cut Skinner's funding completely in October
of four. And it's just a shame because Top Gun
could have been a totally different movie if you think
(28:42):
about it. I know, the animated Disney movie Top Gun
would have been Okay, So you know you sneaked in
another animal based study, and so I'm going to do
the same and tell you about this fateful experiment that
sent the first humble tart de grade to space. All Right,
I feel like I've seen tartar grades and the news
or reported on a lot in recent years. But remind
(29:04):
me of what that is because it rings a bell
as an animal, but it also just sounds like something
that might be from like Doctor Who or something. M Yeah, So,
targe grades are these microscopic, eight legged potato looking things.
They look like little monster potatoes. Sometimes they were called
water bears or moss piglets, and you can actually find
them in just about every habitat on Earth. You can
(29:26):
find them on like mountaintops, rainforest, the bottom of lags
even even in Antarctica, which is pretty incredible. But you know,
speaking of doctor who, because you mentioned it, the team
behind the study must have been fans, because they actually
named their experiment targe grades in space or tartis. Actually,
I just pulled up a picture and they do look
both cute and freaky, and it's crazy that they're only
(29:48):
like a millimeter big. But so you said, we shot
these things into space for some reason, Yeah, a team
of European researchers wanted to test just how resilient these
tartar grades really are, because you can probably tell from
that list of habitats that you know, they're hardy creatures
and they can survive temperatures as low as negative three
twenty eight degrees fahrenheit or as high as three hundred
(30:09):
degrees fahrenheit. They can also stand up to pressures as
powerful as six thousand times that of the Earth's atmosphere,
and they can even survive doses of radiation that are
thousands of times stronger than it would take to kill
a humans. So clearly they're super tough creatures, and it
actually turns out there so tough they can even survive
exposure to the vacuum of outer space. Wow. So so
(30:31):
researchers just flew a bunch of these what you what
do you call them? I like the name of moss picklets.
I think that was my favorite. So they flew these
things into space and just like chuck them out the
airlock or what Yeah, I mean the the approach was
a little more nuanced than that. So first they dehydrated
the targerets and uh, you know, that makes them enter
this state of hibernation where all their metabolic activity drops
(30:52):
to about point one percent of normal levels. And then
once they're in this protective state, the researchers exposed one
group of water bears to the acumum space and another
to both the vacuum space and this immense radiation from
the Sun. And after full ten days of this, right
ten days, the target grades were brought back to Earth
and rehydrated, and amazingly, sixty percent of the targe grades
(31:15):
exposed only to outer space survived, and even among the
ones who were also exposed to solar radiation, a handful
were successfully revived. And the craziest part, some of these
even went on to produce healthy offspring. So those things
are pretty much unstoppable. But you know, I actually have
my own weird space experiment to share, and I happen
to think it blows yours away. Man, I just wanted
(31:36):
to get heads up on this. And this. This comes
from when a two man crew took the Gemini three
on a several trips around the Earth's orbit, and one
of the astronauts on that mission, John Young, was apparently
not a fan of the kind of the standard food
from a tube that NASA was typically providing them, because
once the pair reached orbit, Young revealed that he had
smuggled aboard a contraband corned beef sandwich in to his
(32:00):
back pocket. I mean, I love the story. I know
the story, but I'm not really sure you can call
it an experiment. I mean it sounds more like a
great anecdote about a hungry astronaut. I don't know, man,
Go actually, let let me help me read this transcript.
I've got this for you. I want you to help
me out here and you'll see what I mean by this.
So I'm gonna be John Young, and you're going to
(32:20):
be Gus Grissome, the co pilot. Are you ready to
do this? Yeah, I've got the script here go, go
for it. It's your line. First, What is it a
corn beef sandwich? Where did that come from? I brought
it with me. Let's see how it tastes, smells, doesn't it.
That's it. That's the whole. The whole incident lasted like
thirty seconds, including the time I know, but it was
(32:43):
worth it because you know, there was thirty seconds, and
that included the time it took the nibble the sandwich
before Young tucked it back into his flight suit. But see,
they wanted to see what it tasted like. That's the experiment.
Does a corn beef sandwich taste and smell the same
in space as it does on Earth? And Young suffered
for his science too. After the mission. He was sternly
chastised by his superiors at NASA, though I guess they
(33:06):
didn't come down on too hard because he was still
permitted to land on the Moon as part of the
Apollo sixteen mission. Well, I am glad that an illicit
sandwich incident didn't cost him his career. Well all right, Well,
I can tell from the smoke coming out of Tristan's
potato that we're running short on time. I do have
a few more weird experiments I wanted to cover, though, well,
thankfully that's exactly what the factops. BOYD, why don't we
(33:35):
start with an experiment by the Swedish playwright August Strenberg.
Strendberg wasn't a scientist, but he certainly had some ideas,
and one of those was his belief that plants had
nervous systems and for some reason botanist had just overlooked it. Anyway,
he was determined to show everyone that plants could feel things.
So during his walks around town, he would take out
(33:55):
some morphine and you know the way we all carry morphine,
I guess in our back pockets, so that he would
inject whatever he saw to see how it would react.
And one day he was arrested for injecting an apple
with the drug. But when he explained he was just
trying to get the apple high in the name of science,
the officer figured he was just a sweet lunatic and
not someone trying to go around poisoning the city and
let him go. So, you know, I've always heard that
(34:19):
thing about how a soul weighs twenty one grahams, which
is odd, like, why does that have to be in
the metric system we live in America about it, right,
which should be like three of announced. But anyway, I
was curious where the idea came from, and apparently it
goes back to to this Massachusetts doctors, this guy named
Duncan McDougal, and so this actually comes from Discover magazine.
(34:41):
But to figure it out, McDougall made this bed fitted
with scales, and then he convinced a bunch of terminally
ill patients and this is pretty crazy that they should
make it their literal deathbed. And then he was actually
pretty meticulous about it. So this is from the magazine quote.
He recorded not only each patient's exact time of death,
but also his total time on the bed, as well
as any changes in weight that occurred around the moment
(35:03):
of expiration. He even factored losses of bodily fluids like
sweat and urine and gases like oxygen and nitrogen into
his calculations. Of course, you know the conclusion right like
after the soul escaped the body, the people weighed twenty
one grams less. Okay, I've got one about a guy
named Hitting Brand, and he really wanted to get wealthy,
and he believed he had a Scrooge McDuck wade to
(35:25):
kind of get there, and that was through p Now.
In sixteen sixty nine, the German alchemist apparently had stalked
about fifteen hundred gallons worth of urine in his basement.
That is just so weird, but growth he was convinced
he could spin it into goal. Of course he couldn't,
but his experiments did lead to one interesting discovery. After
(35:46):
boiling one sample, he noticed a bit of unusual glowing liquid,
which is how he ended up discovering phosphorus. Oh that's amazing.
So you'll be happy to know that I didn't just
look up what turkeys are attracted to. I also looked
into chick in preferences. And according to one study, chickens
don't like ugly people. And basically the scientist Dr Stefano
(36:07):
Garlanda at the Zoology Institution of Stockholm University, he was
trying trying to understand whether physical attraction is inherited due
to genes or learned. So he tested it the way
any of us would. He took some I guess libidinous chickens,
and these birds were just hot to trot or what. Yeah,
they were definitely quote excited and and uh. He showed
(36:29):
them photos of people to see which ones they wanted
to meet with and which ones they had picked. So
care Landa took photos of thirty five males and females
and these are humans, and they mashed them into these
digital picks of these very average looking people and male
birds mostly pecked photos of women. Hens mostly pecked photos
of men. And then Geir Landa gave them this other task. Right,
He created another set of more faces, and this time
(36:52):
he asked college students to rate the faces on attractiveness.
So percent of the time the chickens actually pecked the
more attractive face. Oh wow, that's that's pretty interesting. Or well,
here's the story I learned from cracked, and it asked
the important question what happens when you get leeches drunk?
You know, we've all wondered this. The idea was that
(37:12):
you can actually improve the rate that leeches sucked blood
if you can just get them a little bit loose beforehand.
So researchers from Norway dipped a bunch of leeches in
guinness and also smeared some in garlic and others in
sour cream. Such a weird experiment, and I'm guessing it
wasn't just the leeches drinking during this experiment, So what happened, Well,
the drunk leeches are not good at sucking blood. I
(37:34):
don't know why this would come as a surprise to anybody.
They just kind of wiggled and couldn't focus. They fell
off the arms, which is just I wish I had
a video of this experiment because it just sounds so weird.
The sour cream leeches fared better with slightly better sucking abilities,
and the garlic coated leeches, like any good vampire, garlic
was their kryptonite. They actually died. That's pretty amazing, and
(37:56):
I'm actually glad we started with rats on cocaine and
ended with leech is on a bender because science is
great and drunken science might even be better. But I'm
gonna give you today's uh today's trophy. Well, thank you,
it's an honor. Now. I'm sure there's so many great experiments.
There were many we couldn't include that we had looked into,
but we'd love to hear from you. If there are
ones that you guys want us to hear about, feel
(38:17):
free to email us. Part Time Genius at how stuff
Works dot com. You can also call us on our
seven fact hot line that's one eight four four pt
Genius or has always hit us up on Facebook or Twitter.
But thanks so much for listening. Thanks again for listening.
(38:44):
Part Time Genius is a production of How Stuff Works
and wouldn't be possible without several brilliant people who do
the important things we couldn't even begin to understand. Tristan
McNeil does the editing thing. Noel Brown made the theme
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(39:06):
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