There is I think an episode of Inspector Morse when Morse, whose investigation has conveniently developed to involve an alluring female psychoanalyst, is told by her ‘I’d love to get you on my couch’. Not like that of course, and such a clichéd line embodies why treatment of the mind can be so fascinating. It’s a chance to ask questions that would usually be considered rude, and to peer into people’s psyche, so far as they’ll let you.
Such curiosity, combined with a dollop of the bizarre is amply sated by Alex Boese’s book Elephants on Acid and other Bizarre Experiments. Here hoax aficionado Boese covers a wide range of scientific enquiry all of which has been published in scientific journals. Some of it comprises a freaky sideshow but most of the experiments – despite their boldness – have actually represented a leap in our understanding of the human condition. It’s predictably psychology heavy; Milgram’s grisly experiments in obedience lead him to conclude ‘if a system of death camps set up…of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would be able to find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town’. Meanwhile his erstwhile school classmate Zimbardo was the instigator of the infamous Stanford experiment, were mild mannered college students rapidly lost themselves in their adopted social roles. Festinger tested his ideas on cognitive dissonance by infiltrating a cult that believed in the imminent end of the world.
Also mentioned are ultimately unsuccessful efforts to get dogs, having seen a bookcase fall on their master, to seek help; the title tale of the consequences of injecting an elephant with LSD, the effects on cockroaches on racing in front of their peers and the effects of LSD on the terminally ill. It’s all told with a jaunty lilt and, unlike a lot of books I review here, is easily read on the bus.
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