Introduction
You likely harbor a fascination for the strange, the macabre, and the eccentric edges of scientific inquiry. Traditional histories sanitize laboratories, presenting science as a series of orderly, polite discoveries. Yet real scientific progress often involves bizarre, taboo, and downright weird experiments that cross ethical boundaries to test human limits.
Alex Boese examines the weirdest, most eccentric, and most taboo experiments in the history of science, separating genuine unorthodox research from sadistic urban legends.
The book guides you through ten thematic areas of unconventional research. You will explore early attempts to animate corpses, the fragility of human sensory perception, and the malleability of memory. The journey continues through the altered states of sleep, bizarre animal studies, the mechanics of attraction, child development, and deep-seated taboos. Finally, you will confront studies on obedience, aggression, and the physical reality of death.
- Can science truly resurrect the dead using electricity?
- How easily can your own memories be altered or entirely fabricated?
- What happens when researchers feed LSD to elephants?
- Why do ordinary people commit acts of extreme cruelty under authority?
1. Frankenstein’s Lab
Early and unorthodox researchers pushed ethical boundaries to test the origins of life, galvanize corpses, and execute radical anatomical transplants. You find that early nineteenth-century scientists used galvanic electricity on human corpses to test whether electrical current could restore life.
Early scientists used galvanic electricity on human corpses to inspire artificial reanimation.
On January 17, 1803, Giovanni Aldini attached a 120-plate copper-and-zinc battery to the corpse of executed murderer George Forster. His jaw quivered, his left eye opened, and his body danced when the current reached his rectum. Andrew Ure later used a 270-plate battery in Glasgow in 1818 to produce similar violent spasms.
In 1836, Andrew Crosse noticed small insects multiplying around his electrified stone device in Somerset, England. After fourteen days, small whitish excrescences appeared, and by twenty-eight days the creatures moved their legs, leading contemporaries to panic. Biologist Richard Owen later identified these creatures as common cheese mites.
Soviet biologist Il'ya Ivanov attempted to create a human-ape hybrid through artificial insemination, driven by pro-Darwinist ideology. On February 28, 1927, Ivanov and his son artificially inseminated female chimpanzees named Babette and Syvette at a West Guinea research facility.
American neurosurgeon Robert White performed brain isolation and eventually completed a full monkey head transplant during a Cold War surgical arms race. On January 17, 1962, White proved a monkey brain could be isolated and kept alive. On June 3, 1964, White transplanted a dog brain under the neck skin of another dog. On March 14, 1970, Robert White separated a monkey's head from its body and reattached it to a new body in Cleveland, Ohio. The monkey woke up, tracked objects with its eyes, and bit White's finger.
2. Sensory Perception
Your senses of touch, taste, smell, sight, and sound are easily fooled by cognitive biases, branding, and environmental suggestions.
Your senses rely heavily on context and expectation rather than objective reality.
In the late 1990s, thirty-five undergraduates at UC San Diego participated in tickle-machine experiments involving a hidden research assistant beneath a table. Psychologist Christine Harris tested opposing theories by having blindfolded subjects believe they were being tickled by a machine while actually being tickled by a hidden assistant, proving people laugh equally at perceived machine tickling. In 1984, researchers April Crusco and Christopher Wetzel had waitresses in Oxford, Mississippi, touch diners' palms or shoulders, resulting in tip increases of 18 to 37 percent.
In 1998, Frédéric Brochet invited fifty-four wine specialists at the University of Bordeaux to taste wines, completely fooling them with white wine dyed red and identical common Bordeaux wines presented as different tiers. In 2005, Read Montague conducted double-blind cola tests at Baylor College of Medicine using an MRI scanner and specialized fluid delivery tubes. Eighty-five percent of the time participants stated a preference for the cup labeled Coke when both contained Coke.
In 1968, Martha McClintock studied 135 Wellesley College dorm mates, discovering that close friends experienced significant menstrual cycle synchronization after a year together. In 1991, Dr. Alan Hirsch pumped pleasant odors into a Las Vegas Hilton gaming floor for forty-eight hours and recorded a 45 percent jump in money spent at machines in the first odorized area. In 1977, a British TV show broadcast a fake smell transmission of a country scent; 179 viewers reported smelling hay, flowers, or bread.
Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris showed subjects a video of people passing basketballs and asked them to count passes; 50 percent of first-time viewers completely missed a person in a gorilla suit walking through the scene. Dr. Yang Dan and colleagues at a University of California laboratory anesthetized a cat, paralyzed it, strapped its eyes open with metal posts, and successfully extracted blurry images of trees and a turtleneck-wearing man from its brain cells. Frances Rauscher, Gordon Shaw, and Katherine Ky tested thirty-six college students at the University of California, Irvine, finding that listening to Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major raised subject IQ scores on spatial tasks by 8–9 points.
3. Total Recall
Memory is not a reliable videotape recorder but a malleable construct subject to context, false implantation, and extreme trauma.
During the 1930s and 1940s at the Montreal Neurological Institute, neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield performed brain surgery using a silver-ball electrode. Touching the temporal lobe of conscious patients triggered spontaneous, vivid memory playback. In 1931, Penfield stimulated a thirty-seven-year-old housewife's temporal lobe during surgery, causing her to report that she saw herself giving birth to her baby girl.
Duncan Godden and Alan Baddeley tested Scottish Sub-Aqua Club divers who learned lists of words twenty feet underwater or on a beach. Those who stayed in the same physical environment scored higher in a same-context advantage.
Daniel Wegner devised the white-bear experiment in 1987 to test unwanted thoughts. You can test this rebound effect with a simple procedure:
- Sit in a room and say whatever comes into your mind for five minutes.
- Verbalize thoughts with the exception of trying not to think of a white bear.
- Ring the table bell every time the phrase or thought of a white bear comes to mind.
Elizabeth Loftus conducted the lost-in-a-mall study in the 1990s. Over a quarter of participants came to clearly remember and elaborate on a completely fictitious scenario about getting lost in a shopping mall at age five.
4. Bedtime Stories
Sleep deprivation, sleep learning experiments, and dream content reveal the fragile boundaries of human consciousness.
In 1942 at an Upstate New York summer camp, Professor Lawrence LeShan tested sleep learning on twenty young boys who bit their nails, using first a phonograph recording and later his own voice. Lawrence LeShan played a recording of a negative phrase about nail biting 300 times a night over 54 nights to sleeping boys at a summer camp, achieving a 40 percent success rate, which increased when he began delivering the suggestion directly in person.
In 1956, William Emmons and Charles Simon published a controlled study at Santa Monica College using an electroencephalograph. When researchers William Emmons and Charles Simon verified that subjects were fully asleep using brain wave monitoring before reading them a list of nouns, the sleep-learning effect completely disappeared.
Randy Gardner, alongside classmates Bruce McAllister and Joe Marciano Jr., and backed by Stanford researcher William C. Dement, stayed awake for eleven days from December 28, 1963, to January 8, 1964. High school student Randy Gardner stayed awake for 264 hours, experiencing slurred speech, memory lapses, and vivid hallucinations before breaking a record and subsequently sleeping for nearly fifteen hours straight.
In 1960, Ian Oswald of Edinburgh University conducted an experiment titled 'Falling asleep open-eyed during intense rhythmic stimulation' using three young men. Ian Oswald demonstrated that subjects subjected to taped-open eyes, flashing lights, loud music, and painful rhythmic electric shocks could still drift into sleep or microsleeps as the brain became habituated to the monotonous sensory input.
French neurophysiologist Michel Jouvet in 1965 and Adrian Morrison in the 1970s operated on cats to study brain stem lesions and paradoxical sleep. Michel Jouvet and later Adrian Morrison discovered that creating lesions in areas like the locus coeruleus disrupts the signal that paralyzes muscles during paradoxical sleep, causing cats to stalk imaginary prey.
In 1965 at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center, Herman Witkin and Helen Lewis showed blue-collar workers disturbing films before sleep. Herman Witkin and Helen Lewis exposed subjects to disturbing pre-sleep films and found that elements from the movies appeared symbolically in their dreams, though the subjects frequently denied any connection.
In 2000, Harvard researcher Robert Stickgold arranged for twenty-seven people, including five amnesiacs, to play Tetris repeatedly before sleeping. Robert Stickgold demonstrated that amnesiac patients with extensive medial temporal lobe damage who could not consciously remember playing Tetris still dreamed of falling Tetris blocks as they fell asleep.
5. Animal Tales
Researchers utilized animals in bizarre trials to test psychoactive drugs, social facilitation, and neurological brain stimulation.
On August 3, 1962, at the Oklahoma City Zoo, doctors gave a fourteen-year-old male Indian elephant named Tusko 297 milligrams of LSD. This massive dose, about three thousand times a human dose, led to seizures and death despite counteractive drugs. In 1982, Ronald Siegel tested two elephants at dosages of .003 mg/kg and .1 mg/kg. He observed increased rocking, vocalizations, and head shaking without inducing a musth-like state.
Robert Zajonc used a 20 x 20 x 20-inch clear plastic cube with a transparent tube runway and bleachers for captive cockroaches to test social facilitation. He demonstrated that the mere presence of others enhances performance on simple tasks while inhibiting performance on complex tasks.
José Delgado pioneered the stimoceiver, a remote-controlled brain chip that allowed him to trigger complex automated behaviors. In 1963 at a bull ranch in Cordova, Spain, José Delgado stopped a charging bull by pressing a button on a remote unit connected to an implanted brain chip.
Animal experiments also examined mating and emergency responses:
- Penn State University researchers placed male turkeys with models and found a head-on-a-stick placed 12 to 15 inches above the floor elicited courtship and mounting movements.
- In November 2001, a researcher stood in an arena and stared at twenty sheep whenever they made eye contact, finding they displayed increased urination.
- Twelve dog owners in an open field and fifteen in an obedience school simulated medical emergencies or falling bookcases while hidden cameras recorded that zero dogs sought help.
6. Mating Behavior and Attraction
Romantic attraction and sexual behavior are governed by misattributed physiological arousal, environmental pressures, and evolutionary adaptations.
Fear-inducing environments can increase perceived romantic attraction through the misattribution of arousal. Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron found that young men approached by an attractive woman on the swaying Capilano Suspension Bridge wrote more erotic stories and were significantly more likely to call her compared to a control group approached on a park bench.
In 1974 on the 450-foot-long Capilano Suspension Bridge, thirteen of twenty men called an interviewer named Gloria, compared to seven of twenty-three men in a park bench control group.
Perceived attractiveness of opposite-sex individuals increases as decision time runs out due to reactance theory. James Pennebaker had students survey bar patrons at various times during the evening, finding that both men and women rated opposite-sex patrons as more attractive near closing time as a reaction to diminishing time for decision-making.
People who receive feedback that they possess a socially stigmatized quality tend to project that same quality onto others, particularly if they have high self-esteem. Dana Bramel tricked Stanford undergraduate men into believing a bogus psychogalvanic skin response apparatus indicated homosexual arousal while viewing partially nude men, observing that subjects projected similar high homosexual scores onto their peers.
During sexual intercourse, human heart rates reach exceptionally high peaks, surpassing the levels recorded in many strenuous physical activities. Inventors Ernst Boas and Ernst Goldschmidt used a bulky cardiotachometer attached via copper electrodes and a long wire to monitor heart rates during various activities.
Doctors Boas and Goldschmidt monitored a husband and wife in 1927 and recorded that the female subject experienced four orgasms during a single evening.
Field experiments on college campuses reveal stark differences between men and women in their receptivity to sexual propositions from strangers. Russell Clark and Elaine Hatfield had student researchers approach attractive strangers of the opposite sex on a university campus and ask direct sexual propositions, such as an invitation to go to bed or back to an apartment.
7. Oh, Baby!
Child development, attachment, and infant behavior studies uncover innate responses, dietary self-selection, and the limits of behaviorism.
John Broadus Watson wanted to shift psychology toward measurable stimulus-response behaviors rather than vague mental states. At the Harriet Lane Nursery Home in 1919, Watson and Rosalie Rayner exposed eleven-month-old Little Albert to a white rat and crashed a hammer against a steel bar, eventually causing the infant to cry at the mere sight of the rat. Behaviorism remained a dominant school in psychological research for fifty years.
Dr. Clara Davis investigated whether unweaned infants could instinctively select a well-balanced diet when given total freedom to choose from a variety of whole foods. In 1928 at Mount Sinai Hospital in Cleveland, Dr. Clara Davis observed three infants aged seven to nine months old—Donald, Earl, and Abraham—who selected their meals from trays containing diverse natural foods. You can test these principles yourself by following specific dietary guidelines:
- Eliminate all junk food including Happy Meals, crisps, pizza, and fizzy drinks.
- Offer a selection of cooked marrow, spinach, raw carrots, unprocessed whole wheat, and cauliflower.
Harry Harlow disproved the dogma that infant-mother attachment is solely driven by hunger by showing that infant monkeys strongly prefer soft, warm physical contact over milk-dispensing wire surrogates. At the University of Wisconsin in the 1950s, Harry Harlow isolated infant rhesus monkeys with a cloth mother made of wood, sponge, and terry cloth, and a wire-mesh mother equipped with a feeding bottle.
Beginning on June 26, 1931, Winthrop and Luella Kellogg adopted a seven-and-a-half-month-old female chimpanzee named Gua and raised her alongside their ten-month-old son Donald in Florida. Gua learned some human habits and outperformed the human infant on certain physical tests, but her inherent chimp nature ultimately prevailed.
8. Toilet Reading
Taboo topics like disgust, flatulence volume, bathroom crowding, and sympathetic magic reveal irrational human psychological hygiene rules.
Paul Rozin studied the psychology of disgust, showing that people reject entirely clean objects if they resemble offensive ones or have touched them. This relies on the law of contagion and the law of similarity.
Participants overwhelmingly preferred disk-shaped fudge over fudge molded to look like a realistic piece of dog feces.
Researchers used a covert periscope and stopwatch in a college restroom to measure how interpersonal distance affects urination. They found that standing closer to a stranger increases micturition delay and decreases micturition persistence due to arousal and stress.
In a midwestern U.S. university restroom in the mid-1970s, an experimenter stood at varying distances from subjects using urinals while a researcher in a stall timed the process.
Dr. Michael Levitt used a rectal tube and collection bag system to gather flatus from subjects who ate pinto beans. Judges rated syringe-extracted samples for odor intensity on a linear scale, allowing researchers to isolate the exact compounds causing rotten egg versus sweet smells.
9. Making Mr Hyde
Ordinary individuals readily commit acts of extreme cruelty, aggression, and obedience when subjected to authoritative pressure and deindividuation.
Stanley Milgram recruited ordinary Americans like postal clerks and teachers at Yale University in the early 1960s to act as teachers who administered escalating shocks, starting at 15 volts up to 450 volts, whenever a learner made a mistake. Despite visible distress and simulated screams from the victim, almost two-thirds of participants obeyed commands up to the maximum voltage.
When subjects could neither see nor hear the victim, obedience was almost total. When they were in the same room and the subject had to physically push the victim's hand onto a metal plate, compliance dropped to 30 percent.
In 1924, graduate student Carney Landis at the University of Minnesota drew lines on subjects' faces with burnt cork, subjected them to various emotional triggers, and ultimately instructed them to hold a live white rat and cut off its head with a knife. Fifteen out of twenty subjects complied.
Charles Sheridan and Richard King used a cute puppy in a shock-grid box where wrong answers resulted in shocks in 1972. Twenty out of twenty-six undergraduate volunteers pushed the shock button up to maximum voltage despite the puppy howling with pain.
Philip Zimbardo asked NYU female college students to electroshock an innocent victim. One group wore flower-patterned pillowcases over their heads and were addressed by number, while the other wore name tags. The bag-wearing coeds held down the shock button far longer and more frequently.
10. The End
Experiments dealing with death, physiological changes during execution, terminal lucidity, and cognitive dissonance expose how humans face mortality.
In 1900, Dr. Duncan MacDougall placed terminally ill tuberculosis patients on an adapted Fairbanks scale. He concluded that an unexplained drop of three-fourths of an ounce at the moment of expiration represented the soul departing. He tested fifteen dogs and found no weight loss at death.
On October 31, 1938, a condemned murderer named John Deering participated in an execution experiment. A prison physician attached electronic sensors to his wrists to record his heartbeat during execution by a firing squad. Deering's resting heart rate was 120 beats per minute right before execution. When the order to fire was given, his heart rate raced up to 180 beats per minute. Four bullets struck his chest, causing his heart to stop 15.6 seconds after the first shot. He was officially pronounced dead 134.4 seconds later.
Dr. Eric Kast tested eighty terminally ill patients with one hundred micrograms of LSD. Seventy-two patients reported gaining insight, fifty-eight found the experience pleasant, and 85 percent wanted to undergo the LSD experience again.
10 Key Ideas
- Early nineteenth-century scientists used galvanic electricity on human corpses to test whether electrical current could restore life.
- Your senses rely heavily on context and expectation rather than objective reality.
- Memory is not a reliable videotape recorder but a malleable construct subject to context, false implantation, and extreme trauma.
- Lawrence LeShan played a recording of a negative phrase about nail biting 300 times a night over 54 nights to sleeping boys at a summer camp, achieving a 40 percent success rate, which increased when he began delivering the suggestion directly in person.
- Researchers utilized animals in bizarre trials to test psychoactive drugs, social facilitation, and neurological brain stimulation.
- Romantic attraction and sexual behavior are governed by misattributed physiological arousal, environmental pressures, and evolutionary adaptations.
- Harry Harlow disproved the dogma that infant-mother attachment is solely driven by hunger by showing that infant monkeys strongly prefer soft, warm physical contact over milk-dispensing wire surrogates.
- Paul Rozin studied the psychology of disgust, showing that people reject entirely clean objects if they resemble offensive ones or have touched them.
- Ordinary individuals readily commit acts of extreme cruelty, aggression, and obedience when subjected to authoritative pressure and deindividuation.
- Experiments dealing with death, physiological changes during execution, terminal lucidity, and cognitive dissonance expose how humans face mortality.