Cole Gamble
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Science can be an ugly business. Progress requires smart people to do nasty things, like cutting up bodies or electrocuting animals. It's just part of the price we pay for advancement.
But sometimes, scientists come up with experiments that seem to serve no other purpose than to fuck with unsuspecting test subjects for their own amusement.
Say you find yourself in a public restroom and notice a man standing at the mirror taking an obsessive interest in combing his hair. At the same time, an overexcited guy tries snuggling up to you in the adjacent urinal, getting as close as possible to share in your moment of dick-wielding intimacy. On top of all that, you get the eerie feeling that someone is secretly staring at your gigglestick through a periscope.
Sound like paranoia (or a David Lynch film)? Wrong. You've been caught in a urination shyness sting. Yes, that's a real thing, done by actual scientists.
Though, clearly, it could be worse.
That guy at the mirror groping his coif is actually intently listening to your pee and trying to determine how fast it's being jettisoned from your chubmarine. The eager beaver next to you is fucking with you on purpose, diligently working to increase your level of discomfort. And yes, there is someone inside the wall, monitoring your urine stream through the world's filthiest viewmaster. All in the name of science, of course.
Here's the paper the three researchers published on their experiment-slash-Porky's reenactment. They wanted to know how an invasion of personal space would affect the speed and flow of someone's urine stream. Really, do we need to list all of the thousands of reasons that information could be important in an emergency?
Their mind-blowing discovery? It takes a guy longer to pee when he's creeped the fuck out. Perhaps even more mind-blowing is the fact that the experiment was likely made possible by grant dollars, which means somebody read this proposal and decided to invest in it, presumably before going on to invent several Japanese game shows.
Back in the 60s, 10 soldiers boarded a military aircraft for what they were told was a routine training mission. After reaching an altitude of 5,000 feet, the plane suddenly lurched and began to plummet back down to Earth.
The pilot took the intercom and informed the soldiers that the aircraft was experiencing catastrophic engine failure, and that everyone aboard should probably start kissing their asses goodbye while they still had lips. But before they could bend over, a steward passed out insurance paperwork and explained that the forms had to be completed in order for anybody's family to be paid a death benefit.
So there they were, rocketing towards a jagged metal resting place by way of fiery explosion, trying to find a flat surface to write on. Then, just as impact seemed imminent, the pilot said, "LOLZ, just kidding about that emergency, folks" and righted the plane. Once safely back on the ground, we like to think the soldiers showed their appreciation for this fine joke by repeatedly sodomizing the pilot with their rifles.
What was the point? To see how extreme stress affected a person's "cognitive ability," measured in this case as the ability to do paperwork.
Also, we might as well test out the new puke bags.
In a revelation that surprised no one ever in the history of anything, researchers determined that errors in cognitive reasoning occur more often if a person is being exposed to unusually high levels of stress. So under no circumstances should you whip out a job application in the middle of a car accident or attempt to file a tax return while being stabbed to death.
It's worth noting that the researchers were unable to repeat the experiment because the soldiers involved had written warnings to future subjects on the plane's airsick bags. The only option at that point would have been to collect all the bags and then crash the plane for real. Which they probably would have done, if they could figure out how to make sure the paperwork survived.
John Watson established the entire psychological field of behaviorism by gallantly conducting experiments on babies. Evidently, getting an baby to work on back in the 20s was easy: You just grabbed one that belonged to one of the hospital's employees... an employee who, it should be noted, was not involved in the experiment. Apart from their relationship to the subject/lab rat, of course.
For this particular experiment, Watson took a baby named Albert and exposed him to rats, monkey masks and burning newspaper. Then he stopped fucking around and began the actual experiment.
Little Albert would be introduced to a series of fluffy white objects, such as a white rat, a white rabbit and a swatch of white fur. Initially, Albert possessed no fear of these things. During subsequent exposures to the same objects, Watson would hammer a steel bar, creating a terrifying racket. In time, whenever Albert saw anything white and fluffy he cried with fear. This is science.
Watson's goal was, of course, to see if it was possible to condition fear in an infant. You know, because prior to this infants were regarded as cold, unfeeling machines, incapable of emotion.
Working tirelessly alongside his assistants, he scared a child for 31 days before returning it to the hospital drenched in terrified excrement (evidently it was just a rental). Unfortunately, Watson spent the entire experiment scaring the shit out of Albert with the hammer of Thor and never got around to actually correcting any of the tremendous psychological damage he was causing, thereby dooming Albert to grow up as a man who pissed his pants at the sight of a cotton ball.
"Who doesn't have a chance at a normal life, is it you? Yes it is! Yes it is!"
As if this wasn't enough, it turns out Watson had wanted to do more. He lamented that he didn't have the time to condition both fear and arousal in Albert by stimulating the child's erogenous zones during the experiments, because back then getting an infant to shit all over his own boner was considered the pinnacle of behavioral research.
In 1954, two scientists named James Olds and Peter Milner found the pleasure center of the brain, dubbing it "Engorgeopolis." [citation needed] They theorized that they could stimulate this area by administering an electric current, and tested their hypothesis by wiring up a rat's brain and providing the little guy with a lever to control the shocks. Soon the rat was banging on the lever up to 2,000 times an hour, missing work, skipping meals and losing its temper with the children.
In 1970, Robert Heath of Tulane University refined the Olds and Milner discovery to test his theory of reversing homosexual behavior through pleasure center stimulation. That's right, Heath wanted to zap the gay away. Unable to locate a readily available supply of gay rats for his experiment, Heath went ahead and found a homosexual male's brain to dig around in.
The subject, B-19, was hooked up just like the rat in the pleasure study. At first Heath administered controlled amounts of stimulation himself, but then handed the pleasure button off to B-19 and allowed the subject to be the lord of his own electric bonerjam.
And stimulate he did. In one three-hour session B-19 pressed the button 1500 times until. According to Heath, "he was experiencing an almost overwhelming euphoria and elation and had to be disconnected." At that point, we're amazed his dick hadn't burst into flames.
Heath's theory was that B-19's sex drive would be so jacked he'd have sex with anything, and for Jesus' sake, why not make it a girl? This being 1970, this was clearly the part of the experiment where you bring in the whore.
When introduced to the female prostitute, however, B-19 did nothing for an hour until the prostitute initiated a sexual encounter herself. Nevertheless, Heath called the experiment a success, having proven that with enough electric shocks directly to the brain, a gay man will have sex with a woman as long as he's locked in a room with her for an hour and can't leave.
And that's why there are no more homosexuals around today.
For a project so inhumane that fellow scientists dubbed it the "Monster" study, the story of this experiment starts off on an oddly inspirational note.
Wendell Johnson grew up with a horribly persistent stuttering problem, so bad that he usually didn't speak at all. However, Johnson turned his handicap into an aptitude for writing and humor which eventually earned him the class presidency and valedictorianship. Johnson went off to the University of Iowa and sought a degree in Psychology in order to commit his life to speech therapy and help children overcome the same adversity.
And by "overcome the same adversity" we mean "get seriously fucked in the mindhole."
"Just remember, if you stutter again, I'll just straight murder your mother. Right in front of you."
Johnson set up an experiment using orphans (the perfect test subjects), some that stuttered and some that just didn't have parents. He and his assistant told the kids they would receive speech therapy, but in reality, only half of them were. The lucky half.
The children in Group A received positive reinforcement, encouragement and in general were praised no matter what they did. The children in Group B were subjected to demoralization and verbal abuse, with staff raining down insults on the children every time they made even the slightest error in their speech--and sometimes when they didn't.
The orphans in Group B developed speech problems, even those who initially had no issues, and some eventually became mute altogether. Many developed learning disabilities, going on to damn the study decades later for "ruining their lives."
Strangely, Group A lost speech fluency as well, demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that Johnson should not have been allowed anywhere near children.
In the 50s, a Scottish-American doctor by the name of Dr. Ewen Cameron believed he had discovered the cure for schizophrenia. His technique involved reprogramming the brain to think in healthy ways by having patients wear headphones playing supportive audio messages such as, "People like you and need you," "You have confidence in yourself" and "You are the master of magnetism."
Sounds rather nice, except Dr. Cameron often put these patients into a sedative coma with a powerful tranquilizer for weeks at a time, locking them in a place nurses came to call the "Zombie Room."
During that comatose state Dr. Cameron would administer "beneficial" electro-shocks, which we assume are related to "therapeutic" hammer punches to the face. His technique also destroyed whole sections of his patients' memory, many of whom were not even schizophrenics.
Oh, did we mention none of this was done with any kind of consent? At this point in the article, you should probably take that as a given.
Word of Cameron's experiments reached the CIA, who took one look at what he was doing and said, "This man is an unethical prick, we must have him." The CIA fired t-shirt guns loaded with cash at Dr. Cameron and eventually folded him into their MK-ULTRA project--you know, the one in which the government experimented on unwilling citizens in an effort to create brainwashed assassins.
Man, why couldn't they have just used orphans like everybody else?
For more scientists that should've been subjected to their own experiments, check out 9 Real Life Mad Scientists. Or check out Dr. Seanbaby's own frightening test, in A Terrifying Psychological Experiment (Using The Sims 3).
Or, visit the Cracked.com Top Picks to see what we're looking at instead of working.
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