Tidsskriftet, the Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association, published an article two years ago (on September 25, 2023) with the headline “Statistics lessons from a salmon“. That article is about the project that was honored with the 2012 Ig Nobel Prize for Neuroscience, “for demonstrating that brain researchers, by using complicated instruments and simple statistics, can see meaningful brain activity anywhere — even in a dead salmon.”
About that Dead Salmon
The Tidsskriftet article begins by saying:
Craig Bennett could not believe his eyes. In his hand, he held an image that showed the brain activity of a salmon, where three statistically significant dots shone back at him – a clear sign that they had made a pioneering discovery in the relationship between salmon and humans. Or else the statistics were wrong….
and it ends by saying:
In 2012, Bennett and his colleagues’ salmon project won an Ig Nobel Prize – the award given to research projects that first make you laugh, and then make you think.
The project aimed to highlight the importance of correcting for multiple comparisons, and the project has gradually become famous in scientific circles. Perhaps it has also achieved its desired goal. When the salmon project was first presented at a conference in 2009 (5), 25–40 % of the articles in the field of fMRI reported no correction for multiple comparisons. When Bennett and his colleagues received the Ig Nobel Prize three years later, this number had dropped to 10 % (1).
But of course, that could be just a coincidence.
BONUS: The Prize-Winning Dead Trout Experiment
That study exclusively about dead fish was the first that resulted in an Ig Nobel Prize.
In 2024 a study about a very different kind of discovery, involving a different species of dead fish, was honored by a prize. The 2024 Ig Nobel Physics Prize was awarded to James Liao “for demonstrating and explaining the swimming abilities of a dead trout”.
BONUS BONUS: The Live Rhinoceroses Suspended Upside-Down from Helicopters
If the idea of knowledge arising from dead fish strikes you momentarily as rather upside down, and you enjoy new twists of thought, read the report published this week (on March 29, 2025) by BBC Focus. The headline is: “How do you re-home a rhino by helicopter? Upside down“.