Researchers wanted to know how well a person’s brain would function in the presence of fear of death. In order to conduct their experiment they use soldiers, who thought they were going on a routine mission. While they were 5000 feet in the air the pilot announced that one of the engines had failed and the landing equipment had malfunctioned, so he was going to have to attempt a landing in the ocean.

The soldiers were handed insurance forms to fill out and were told that the army wanted them to be covered for the loss. Unbeknownst to the soldiers, the forms where written in a confusing matter, so once the last soldier finished filling out the form, the pilot let them in on what was going on. A group of soldiers that were safe on the ground were asked to fill out the same form as the ones in the air. The soldiers that were in the air made more mistakes on the form than the ones on the ground, so it was concluded that the brain will have a tendency to make more mistakes in the presence of fear than one that is at a restful state.

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Carney Landis wanted to find out if certain emotions evoked the same facial expressions in each person, so he came up with an experiment to find out. Once he found volunteers, brought them into a lab and drew lines on each of their faces so he could clearly see the muscles move. He would take pictures during the experiments. He then exposed them all to the same things in order to catch their reactions. He had them listen to jazz music, smell ammonia, look at pornographic pictures, and place their hands in a bucket of frogs.

For the final experiment he would bring out a live white mouse and ask them to cut its head off. The people would question if he was serious about this one. He would tell them he was and even encourage it. The people involved would be hesitant to pick up the knife and then they would put it back down. The men would curse and the women would cry. Some of them would not do it at all, but the two thirds that did do it performed it clumsily. He was shocked by how people would be willing to comply with the orders that they are given, but never found a common facial expression of the ones that performed the experiment.

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Researchers Martin Schein and Edgar Hale wanted to know about the sexual behaviors of turkeys. What they discovered is that the male species were not fussy. They placed a model of a female turkey in a room and observed the male turkey mating with it like he would have it was a live one. This intrigued them, so they wanted to know what it would take to make the turkey become uninterested. They began by removing parts of the model one by one. They removed the tail, feet and wings and the male turkey still mated with it. Finally, they just put the head on a stick and they still mated with it. They came to the conclusion that because the males are some much larger than the females that the head of the female turkey is the part that turns the males on.

They continued to experiment, wondering what it would take for the male not to want to mate with a head. What they discovered was a fresh female head was first place in the mating, then a dried out male head, then a two year old female head, and then a balsa wood head would still stimulate the turkey.

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Surgeon Vladimir Demikhov wanted to shock the world so he created a two headed dog. He connected a head of a puppy to that of a full grown German Sheppard. He then proceeded to invite the press to witness his creation. What were discovered are the shared commonalities the two heads had. When one was hungry the other one was, when one was hot and panting so did the other head, when one yawned so did the other. The only difference was that the older the dog would try and shake off the other head and in return the other one would bite the ear of the older dog. He continued to do these experiments for years in hoping to learn how to be successful at performing a heart transplant.

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Researcher Ian Oswald wanted to know if it was possible to fall asleep with your eyes open. So, he conducted a study. He would ask the individual to lie down on a couch and would tape their eyes open. He then would place a flashing light in front of them, he attached electrodes to their legs to deliver shocks and blast blues music in their ears. Performing an EEG, he found that no matter what happened the individual would be asleep with the span of twelve minutes. Through his study, he found that when the brain is faced with the same monotony, then it is apt to fall asleep no matter what. This can explain why people are apt to fall asleep while driving down a wooded road in the middle of the day.

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Written by Harmony Stalter – weirdworm.com
Read More – Elephants on Acid and Other Bizarre Experiments (by Alex Boese)