Rat was sad

Jake, Evil Monkey, and Shelly are at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting. Jake has this to say about the state of research:

There are the researchers of breathtaking sophistication who hide tiny details in the fine print of their poster that are more interesting than my entire thesis. But for each one of them there are fifty "We removed left hemisphere of rat. Rat was sad." and at least a hundred "While subject was in fMRI, we showed them a Marx brothers video as opposed to a documentary on the meadow vole. Activity was different. We don't know why."

That made me laugh. I don't know why.

More like this

There are a bagillion people here -- a bagillion. No other word appropriately conveys how many neuroscientists are in this building. That being the case and there being so many exhibits and lectures and craziness going on absolutely simultaneously, it has become an issue about how to break down…
The scientific process is composed of generating hypotheses and testing those hypotheses through experiment. Yet we don't know a whole lot about how about hypothesis generation happens on the level of the brain. Recognizing that I am dealing with a loaded term -- scientists have strong opinions…
The Society for Neuroscience meeting is coming up, taking place in San Diego in the midst of all the furor and flames. While I'm not going to the meeting, I was reminded of a funny fake science poster I saw at SFN back in 2004: "Joint Encoding of Motion and Music in a Neuron in the Sea Monkey…
Love is all around us and love is in the air, and if I know my mainstream science reporters, today they will have you believe that love is in our genes too. A new report suggests that variation in a gene called AVPR1A has a small but evident influence on the strength of a relationship, the…

OK, I'll bite ...

Why a duck?

By John Lynch (not verified) on 15 Oct 2006 #permalink

One of its legs are both the same?

By JohnnieCanuck (not verified) on 16 Oct 2006 #permalink

"One of its legs are both the same?"

Yes, the left is more!