Today’s Icky Research Item award (with echoes from earlier French and British work—see below) goes to this new Dutch study: “Decapitation in Rats: Latency to Unconsciousness and the ‘Wave of Death’“, Clementina M. van. Rijn, Hans Krijnen, Saskia Menting-Hermeling, Anton M. L. Coenen, PLoS ONE 6(1): e16514. (Thanks to investigator and LFHCfS member Holly Brothers […]
Tag: experiment
Why companies don’t do experiments
Dan Ariely (who won an Ig Nobel Prize for showing that expensive fake medicine works better than inexpensive fake medicine) explains how corporations sometimes prefer to make decisions: Companies pay amazing amounts of money to get answers from consultants with overdeveloped confidence in their own intuition. Managers rely on focus groups—a dozen people riffing on […]
Driving while blinding self with helmet
This video shows a man driving an automobile down a major highway while a helmet repeatedly flaps shut, blinding him. It documents the experiment described in “The attentional demand of automobile driving” [Senders, J. W., Kristofferson, A. B., Levison, W. H., Dietrich, C. W., & Ward, J. L., Highway Research Record, vol. 195, 1967, pp. […]