Thursday Thirteen!

Posted by Leslie on May 14th, 2008 | 5 Comments

{Edition XXVIII}

Top Thirteen Bizarre Experiments

Taken from the Museum of Hoaxes - although these experiments were not hoaxes and did actually occur! Click over to read the full accounts and the other seven experiments listed!

1. Elephants on Acid - What happens if you give an elephant LSD? On Friday August 3, 1962, a group of Oklahoma City researchers decided to find out.

2. Obedience - Imagine that you’ve volunteered for an experiment, but when you show up at the lab you discover the researcher wants you to murder an innocent person.

3. Two-headed Dogs - In 1954 Vladimir Demikhov shocked the world by unveiling a surgically created monstrosity: A two-headed dog.

4. The Initiation of Heterosexual Behavior in a Homosexual Male - Test whether repeated stimulation of the septal region could transform a homosexual man into a heterosexual.

5. The Isolated Head of a Dog - What could be more horrific than creating a two-headed dog? What about keeping the severed head of a dog alive apart from its body!

6. Human-Ape Hybrid - For decades dark rumors circulated alleging that the Soviets had conducted experiments to try to create a human-ape hybrid by breeding chimpanzees and humans, but it wasn’t until the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of Russian archives that the rumors were confirmed.

7. The Stanford Prison Experiment - Philip Zimbardo was curious about why prisons are such violent places. Is it because of the character of their inhabitants, or is it due to the corrosive effect of the power structure of the prisons themselves?

8. Facial expressions while decapitating a rat - In 1924 Carney Landis, a graduate student in psychology at the University of Minnesota, designed an experiment to study whether emotions evoke characteristic facial expressions.

9. The Vomit-Drinking Doctor - How far would you go to prove a theory? Stubbins Ffirth, a doctor-in-training living in Philadelphia during the early nineteenth century, went further than most. Way further.

10. Beneficial Brainwashing - Dr. Ewen Cameron believed he had come up with a cure for schizophrenia. His theory was that the brain could be reprogrammed to think in healthy ways by forcibly imposing new thought patterns on it.

11. Monkey-Head Transplant - When Vladimir Demikhov unveiled his two-headed dogs in 1954, it inspired a strange kind of surgical arms race (or rather, head race) between the two superpowers.

12. The Remote-Controlled Bull - An experimental demonstration of the ability of his “stimoceiver” to manipulate behavior. The stimoceiver was a computer chip, operated by a remote-control unit, that could be used to electrically stimulate different regions of an animal’s brain.

13. The Ape and the Child - What if an animal were raised by humans — as a human. Would it eventually act like a human?

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