Composed of more than a hundred billion neurons, our brain is one of the most complex parts of our body. It controls our body, actions, speech, and all other functions. But surprisingly, with a few tricks, we can control our brain or more specifically our thoughts and actions. The trick is to know some psychological techniques and use them wisely. Here are 10 such useful tricks which can help you in long run.
Depressionis a serious issue and it has long been studied by universities and colleges but the exact cause of depression is still to be determined. According to the World Health Organization, an estimated 350 million people around the world suffer from depression. A guest writer at the Huffington Post named Johann Hari described the potential deeper causes of depression
The story begins with Dr. Vincent Felitti’s clinic in the 1980’s. His practice was known to be one of the last places for extremely obese people to visit. His office was long regarded as the place for people in the most severe stages of obesity. Within his program, many people were able to shed incredible amounts of weight and regain a healthy lifestyle. But he noticed that the people who lost the most weight very often went into a ‘brutal depression, or panic, or rage. Some of them [even] became suicidal.’
Dr. Felitti couldn’t understand the problem until he spoke to a 28-year-old woman. In less than a year, 51 weeks, the woman went from a whopping 408 pounds to 132 pounds. But suddenly, she put on over 40 pounds in a couple of weeks and before long she regained all her weight back and was above 400 pounds once again. When Dr. Felitti talked to her, she said that when she was obese, men wouldn’t be interested in her but after she lost all that weight, she began to incur the interest of the opposite sex and being unaccustomed to the attention, she would flee from the interaction and gorge herself on food.
As the conversation unraveled, Dr. Felitti asked the woman when she began to compulsively eat and the woman said at the age of 11. When Dr. Felitti began to probe, he found out that this was the age when her grandfather began molesting her.
Dr. Felitti later found out that of the 183 people in his program, 55 percent of the people there had been sexually abused as a kid. One woman said: ‘overweight is overlooked, and that’s the way I need to be.’ Dr. Felitti said: ‘what we had perceived as the problem ― major obesity ― was in fact, very frequently, the solution to problems that the rest of us knew nothing about.’
This prompted Dr. Felitti to launch a research program that was funded by the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention. He discovered that there was a direct correlation between childhood trauma and the risk of adult depression. If a child had seven categories of traumatic events then they were 3,100 percent more likely to commit suicide as an adult! (With an additional 4,000 percent higher chance of being an injecting drug user.)
But the research found out that just by discussing the childhood trauma there could be a huge reduction in medical care. Johann Hari wrote for the Huffington Post, saying: ‘Just being able to discuss the trauma led to a huge fall in future illnesses ― there was a 35-percent reduction in their need for medical care over the following year. For the people who were referred to more extensive help, there was a fall of more than 50 percent.’ And, as Dr. Robert Anda put it: ‘it’s time to stop asking what’s wrong with them and time to start asking what happened to them.’
Wonders of the human brain, with all its intelligent and emotional powers, have always attracted the brightest of humans. Many of the psychologists and neurologists have made great efforts to understand the human brain in order to understand and/or control human behavior. With the evolution of civilization, the extent at which the scientists go in their experiments, have now become very human. However, many of the experiments still fall under the completely inhumane, unethical, and immoral area. We’ve compiled a list of the 10 most bizarre, unethical, and inhumane psychological experiment that went horribly wrong and ended up with disastrous results.
1. Tony LaMadrid – This University of California study asked the participants who were schizophrenics to stop taking medicine. The result of the program was devastating when almost all the participant patients relapsed into the mental illness and one participant committed suicide.
Tony LaMadrid, a 23-year-old male with a history of depression and schizophrenia, was being treated for the same at the UCLA Medical Center Psychiatric Department from 1985 to 1989. During that time, he was both a patient and an active participant in a psychiatric study approved by the university. This study, “Developmental Processes in Schizophrenic Disorders,” was directed by psychologist Keith H. Nuechterlein with psychiatrist Michael Gitlin, and its aim was to gather data on the how and why of schizophrenic relapses. This experiment required patients to get off the medicines to evaluate effects of the medicine on the patients, on the non-patients, and on the way the brain works. The experiment vaguely listed the potential negative side effects of the removal of medicine by mentioning that the patient’s condition may improve, worsen, or remain unchanged. However, the exact nature of the potential relapse was unspecified.
The patients undergoing the treatment and consequent experiment responded very negatively to the experiment. The result of the experiment was disastrous when more than 90% of the patients experienced very severe relapses over the course of the experiment. The experiment was also contaminated by many of the patients who resented being on medication often lying about the effects of the experiment on them. The experimenters never reinstated the medication nor did they delve deeper into the lives of the victims for further investigation. About six years into the experiment, Tony committed suicide by jumping off a building.(source)
2. Project QKHILLTOP – Another CIA project from the 50s that aimed to study Chinese brainwashing techniques which they then used to develop new methods of interrogation. The participants were subjected to “chemical, biological, and radiological” means for mind control in addition to imprisonment, deprivation, humiliation, torture, brainwashing, and hypnoses during the project.
In 1954, the CIA initiated a project named QKHILLTOP aimed to study Chinese brainwashing techniques and to develop effective methods of interrogation. Most of these studies were performed by the Cornell University Medical School’s human ecology study programs under the supervision of the director Dr. Harold Wolff. Dr. Wolff asked the CIA to provide him any information they could find regarding threats, coercion, imprisonment, deprivation, humiliation, torture, “brainwashing,” “black psychiatry,” and hypnosis, or any combination of these, with or without chemical agents. The research team would then assemble, collate, analyze, and assimilate this information and then undertake experimental investigations designed to develop new techniques of offensive/defensive intelligence use. He also asked for “suitable subjects” (Human beings) on whom his team could try this information and techniques. These techniques often involved secret drugs and various brain-damaging procedures. And to conduct these experiments, in addition to the subjects, he also asked for a proper place.
The results were so devastating that one author calls the CIA researchers “a bunch of bumbling sci-fi buffoons,” rather than a rational group of men who had run torture laboratories and medical experiments in major US universities. These experiments which involved torture, rape, and psychological abuse of adults and young children resulted in many of these participants becoming permanently insane.(source)
3. Emma Eckstein and Sigmund Freud – German doctor Freud treated patient Emma for hysteria and excessive masturbation even though Emma asked for help with vague symptoms like stomach ailments and mild depression. He performed a radical surgery on Emma with just a local anesthetic and cocaine. When the surgery turned out to be disastrous, Freud fled from the remedial surgery in horror.
At the age of 27, Emma Eckstein went to Dr. Sigmund Freud for stomach ailments and slight depression. Freud diagnosed Emma as suffering from hysteria and believed that she masturbated to excess. Since masturbation was considered as a dangerous mental illness in those days, Freud started a three-year-long psychoanalysis treatment of Emma.
Even though Emma proved to be a leading factor in major theories of Freud, including “Psychopathology,” “theory of deferred action,” and “the wish theory of psychosis and dreams,” it was Freud’s obsession with operating on Emma’s nose and sinuses to treat nasal reflex neurosis was what resulted in disaster. Since Freud believed that Emma’s habitual masturbation caused severe leg pain, and since he believed that the tissue of the nose and genitalia were linked, it can be cured by removing the middle turbinate. Freud performed a disturbing experimental surgery with Dr. Wilhelm Fliess on Emma in which she was anesthetized with only a local anesthetic and cocaine before the inside of her nose was cauterized. The surgery proved to be a disaster resulting in profuse, recurrent nasal bleeding. Freud left a half-meter of gauze in Emma’s nasal cavity and the procedure of removing that gauze left Emma permanently disfigured. During this disastrous operation, Freud fled from the remedial surgery in horror.
Freud later concluded that Emma’s post-operative hemorrhages were hysterical “wish-bleedings” linked to “an old wish to be loved in her illness” and triggered as a means of “re-arousing [Freud’s] affection.” However, Emma continued her analysis with Freud until she was restored to full mobility and went on to practice psychoanalysis herself.(source)
4. Electroshock Therapy on Children – Dr. Lauretta Bender of New York’s Creedmoor Hospital employed electroconvulsive therapy for children with social issues. In this treatment which was performed on more than 100 children, they administered electroshock therapy to the patients every day for a total of twenty treatments. The children ended up being more anxious and were also observed to develop visual body distortion as the result of the test.
In the ’50s and ’60s, the head of children’s psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, Lauretta Bender, started conducting extensive research on autism. She believed that autism is a type of schizophrenia and was often one of the first signs. For further research, she started experiments on the autistic kids where she administered electroconvulsive therapy to autistic patients. Bender’s methods included interviewing and analyzing a sensitive child in front of a large group, then applying a gentle amount of pressure to the child’s head. Supposedly, any child who moved with the pressure was showing early signs of schizophrenia. The experiments also included insulin-shock therapy where they gave the kids overdoses of insulin that put them into a short-term coma. She also gave the kid patients antipsychotic drugs like Thorazine. She also tried giving autistic kids LSD every day for nine months or more, but decided they were becoming “more anxious.” By the time this therapy was stopped, Bender administered electroconvulsive therapy to at least 100 children ranging in age from three years old to 12 years, with some reports indicating the total may be twice that number.
The results of these experiments were as shocking as the therapy itself. The condition of the children only worsened after the therapy. One six-year-old child went from being a shy, withdrawn child to acting increasingly aggressive and violent. A seven-year-old girl after five electroshock sessions became nearly catatonic. One of the Bender’s patients who became overly aggressive after about 20 such treatments was convicted for multiple murders later in adult life. Many other patients in their adulthood were reportedly in and of trouble and prison for a battery of petty and violent crimes. Two psychologists who conducted a study on the 50 of Bender’s young electroshock patients, concluded that nearly all patients were worse off after the “therapy” and some had become suicidal after the treatment.(source)
5. Sexual Reassignment – David Reimer, a Canadian boy, became the victim of a circumcision process accident when he was only seven months old in which his penis was destroyed. Dr. John Money persuaded the baby’s parents that sex reassignment surgery would be in Reimer’s best interest. The end result of the project was that in addition to his difficult lifelong relationship with his parents, other psychological issues, and unemployment, David took his own life by shooting himself.
In 1965, David (who was originally named Bruce) and Brian, two identical twin brothers, were born in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Six months later, the boys were diagnosed with phimosis. When they were referred for circumcision at the age of seven months in 1966, a urologist performed the operation on Bruce using the unconventional cauterization method. The procedure failed burning Bruce’s penis beyond repair. Doctors then chose not to operate on the twin Brian who was lucky enough to have his phimosis cleared later without surgery.
Parents who were concerned about Bruce’s future happiness and sexual function without a penis took him to Dr. John Money at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore in 1967. Money was a psychologist and a pioneer in the field of sexual development and gender identity. He was the proponent of the “theory of gender neutrality”- that gender identity developed primarily as a result of social learning from childhood and that it could be changed with appropriate behavioral interventions.
Money and team persuaded Bruce’s parents that “sex reassignment surgery” would be in his best interest. At the age of 22 months, Bruce underwent a bilateral orchiectomy in which his testicles were surgically removed and a rudimentary vulva was fashioned. Bruce was reassigned to be raised as a female and was given the name Brenda. Money provided psychological support for the reassignment and continued to see him for about a decade for the consultation and to assess the outcome.
The results, according to Money himself, were very positive, however, during the once-a-year visit to Money, Bruce’s parents often lied about the success of the procedure and Bruce had experienced the visits to Baltimore as traumatic rather than therapeutic.
Bruce didn’t identify as a girl. He was ostracized and bullied by peers. He did not feel like a female even with the fancy dresses and female hormones. By the age of 13, Bruce became suicidal and threaten to take his own life if he was made to see Money again. On May 4, 2004, Bruce drove to a grocery store’s parking lot in his hometown of Winnipeg and took his own life by shooting himself in the head with a sawed-off shotgun at the age of 38 years.(source)
6. Project Artichoke – the CIA conducted a series of mind control projects using various methods and substances such as hypnosis, LSD, and total isolation as a form of physiological harassment for special interrogations on human subjects. The operation resulted in subjects left with fogged, faulty, and vague memories and amnesia.
In 1951, the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence initiated a project named “Artichoke” aimed at controlling minds. This project was supervised by an agent from the CIA research staff, a former army brigadier general, Paul F. Gaynor, and it gathered information from the intelligence divisions of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and FBI. The project also included the scope of the question, “Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature, such as self-preservation?”
The experiments also carried out in-house and overseas experiments using LSD in addition to hypnosis and total isolation to harass subjects psychologically and for interrogation techniques on human subjects. The project also studied effects of forced morphine addiction, drug withdrawal, and the use of chemicals to incite amnesia on the unwilling human subjects. For the project participants or subjects, the CIA chose weaker members of the human race which according to them were homosexuals, racial minorities, and military prisoners. For the locations, they chose isolated places in Japan, Europe, Asia, and the Philippines.
Apart from the obvious inhumane results of the projects where all the participants became the victims of PTSD and amnesia, the collateral damage was even more horrible. The outbreak of dengue in the Key West city of Florida in 2010 where about 10 percent, or 1,000 people, of the coastal town’s population, were infected with the dengue fever virus was attributed to the usage of virus for experiments in this project. When Project Artichoke included viruses in their experiments, the official CIA document read, “Not all viruses have to be lethal…the objective includes those that act as short-term and long-term incapacitating agents.” Many CIA documents, as well as the findings of a congressional committee in 1975, revealed that three sites in Florida – Key West, Panama City, and Avon Park and two other locations were used by the CIA for experiments with mosquito-borne dengue fever and other biological substances.(1, 2)
7. Operation Midnight Climax – Part of a larger CIA-sponsored mind control project, this project aimed at luring subjects to the safe houses and secretly give them LSD and other mind-altering substances. The project resulted in the participants having psychotic public outburst episodes on numerous occasion.
In the 1950s, the CIA as a part of Operation Midnight Climax, set up safe houses in San Francisco, Marin, and New York City. These safe houses acted as brothels to obtain a selection of men who would be too embarrassed to talk about the events. The CIA instructed the prostitutes who were on the CIA payroll to lure clients back to the safe houses where they were secretly infused with a wide range of substances, including LSD, and were monitored behind one-way glass. These lured civilians were also subject to the various studies that included extensive research into sexual blackmail, surveillance technology, and the possible use of mind-altering drugs in field operations. Apart from these totally illegal experiments, subjects were blackmailed into keeping the experiments a secret by threatening to extend their ‘’trips’’ indefinitely.
The operation soon expanded and CIA operatives began drugging people in restaurants, bars, and beaches. Not only civilians, but CIA employees, U.S. military personnel, and agents suspected of working for the other side in the Cold War were also drugged and became unwilling participants in this operation. The outcome of the project was horrible. There are documented instances of people having long-term debilitation. There are also reports of several deaths resulting from this project. Other adverse reactions included an instance where an operative who unwillingly received the drug in his morning coffee became psychotic and ran across Washington, seeing a monster in every car that passed him. Another psychotic outburst included Dr. Frank Olson who was an Army scientist and never took LSD or any mind-altering drug, went into deep depression after he was surprisingly and unwillingly was drugged with LSD, and when the effects of LSD, commonly called as “trip,” started. He later fell from a thirteen story window.(source)
8. Stanford Prison Experiment – the US Navy-funded Stanford University prison experiment attempted investigating the psychological effects of perceived power focusing on the power struggle between prisoners and prison officers. The experiment was ended abruptly after six days when some participants developed their roles as the officers, enforced authoritarian measures, and ultimately subjected some prisoners to psychological torture.
On August 14, 1971, Sandford University professor Dr. Philip Zimbardo started an experiment in an attempt to test the hypothesis that the inherent personality traits of prisoners and guards are the chief cause of abusive behavior in prison. He recruited 24 of the most psychologically stable and healthy male student participants by informing them that they would be in a two-week prison simulation. The US Office of Naval Research funded this research as an investigation into the cause of difficulties between guards and prisoners in the US Navy and US Marine Corps.
Zimbardo provided wooden batons to them and asked them to not physically harm the prisoners or withhold food or drinks. He, however, asked the guards to apply psychological pressure by, “creating in the prisoners the feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled by us, by the system, you, me, and they’ll have no privacy … We’re going to take away their individuality in various ways. In general, what all this leads to is a sense of powerlessness. That is, in this situation, we’ll have all the power and they’ll have none.” Prisoners were “arrested” at their homes and “charged” with armed robbery. The local Palo Alto police department assisted Zimbardo with the arrests and conducted full booking procedures on the prisoners, which included fingerprinting and taking mug shots. They also transported the prisoners to the mock prison from the police station, where they were strip-searched and given their new identities.
The horrible results started showing from the second day onward. A few prisoners started refusing to follow guards’ instructions and one guard attacked prisoners with a fire extinguisher. Within 36 hours, one prisoner started acting crazy and started screaming, cursing, and going into a rage. It took the supervising team a while to realize the prisoner was really suffering psychologically. As time passed, the guards started harassing prisoners mentally and physically. The experiment was halted after only six days when several guards became increasingly cruel, and approximately one-third of the guards exhibited genuine sadistic tendencies. Most of the guards were upset when the experiment was halted after only six days.(source)
9. Milgram Experiment – This Yale University psychology experiment measured the willingness of a test subject to obey an authority figure. In the experiment, they separated two participants into two rooms where they could hear but not see each other. Then they asked the test subject to ask questions to the other and for each wrong answer, they would be punished with an electric shock. Contradictory to the researchers’ expectations, the experiment found that a very high proportion of people were prepared to obey, albeit unwillingly, even if apparently causing serious injury and distress.
Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University in 1961, began a series of social psychological experiments to measure the willingness of the study participants, men from a diverse range of occupations with varying level of education, to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience. The experiment started three months after the start of the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram developed this study to answer the hot topic question of the time: “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?” This experiment was repeated many times over the years with consistent results around the globe.
In the experiment, they assigned roles of a teacher and a learner to the two participants. They chose an actor for the role of the learner and the test subject for the role of teacher. However, they kept it secret to the subject that the actor was also a teacher. They instead give the impression that the actor is. Milgram then placed both in an adjacent room and strapped the actor into an electric chair. Milgram also told the subject that the learner had a heart condition. They also gave the subject a sample electric shock to experience the pain the learner would experience. They gave the teacher a list of word pairs to teach the learner. The teacher would then read the first word of each pair and give the learner four option to choose the correct answer from. For every wrong answer, the teacher was to administer an electric shock to the learner with the voltage increasing in 15-volt increments for each wrong answer.
Some subjects stopped administrating electric shock to the learner after reaching 135 volts, however, most continued when they were assured that they would not be held responsible. Some, upon hearing the pain induced screams of the learners, started showing extreme stress signs such as nervous laughing. In the first set of experiments, 65 percent of experiment participants administered the experiment’s final massive 450-volt shock. In addition to the literal electric shock, the participants suffered extreme emotional stress and inflicted insights.(source)
10. Monster Study – This University of Iowa experiment involved orphan children from Davenport, Iowa. The supervisor divided these children into two groups and gave each group separate speech therapy. One group received positive and other received negatively. This study resulted in the children suffering lifelong negative psychological effects.
In 1939, Wendell Johnson, a University of Iowa professor with the help of his graduate student Mary Tudor, conducted an experiment involving 22 orphan children from Davenport, Iowa. They selected 22 subjects from a veterans’ orphanage in Iowa. They didn’t inform the intent of the research to the children and led them to believe that they were receiving speech therapy. Out of the 22 students, 10 students were stutterers, and the goal of the experiments was to try to induce stuttering in healthy children and to see whether telling stutterers that their speech was fine would produce a change.
This experiment created negative psychological effects on the orphans who were part of the negative therapy. Some of them retained speech problems for the rest of their lives. The experiment was called “Monster Study” as some of the Johnson peers were horrified that he would experiment on orphans to confirm a hypothesis. Johnson never published the results of the experiments in any peer-reviewed journals and Tudor’s thesis is the only official record of the details of the experiment. The experiment was kept hidden as it was feared to harm Johnson’s reputation in the wake of human experiments conducted by the Nazis during World War II.(source)
Packs of playing cards are sold just about everywhere, and nearly everyone has played a card game or two in their life. There’s go fish, poker, blackjack, and literally hundreds of others. Each deck is a marvel of engineering, design and history, loaded with secrets that have been whispered and distorted with each retelling. Here are 10 secrets about a standard deck of playing cards that have been hiding in plain sight all this time.
Snap
If you’ve ever shuffled a deck of playing cards before, you’ve heard that satisfying "snap" sound while the cards flip through your hands. It is glue, not plastic, that makes playing cards snap. The tension and elasticity is important for the durability and feel of each card. But while cards feature a plastic coating (usually dimpled, to give a little bit of a slide), it’s layers of glue that give each card its backbone.
Back Desing
You might not think the designs on the backs of the cards have any real significance, but they sure do. There are two major kinds of backs, and that’s a big deal to card workers, magicians and casinos. There’s a key feature that magicians look for that is its borders. For example, magicians look for cards with no outside borders because it helps them better hide their tricks. Casino card handlers will also tell you certain designs work better with certain games to prevent scams.
Beveled Edge
Magicians and sleight-of-hand experts pay close attention to the razor-thin edges of the cards. Stacks of cards are cut by very powerful cutting machines with impressively strong blades. The machine makes the same up-and-down cutting motion. That blade movement creates a beveled edge, where either the back or face is slightly larger. The direction of that bevel depends entirely on which direction the cards are facing when they are cut. The knife edge helps cards weave together more easily.
Kentucky Origins
Even though there are many brands of playing cards, nearly all of them are, in fact, printed in the same facility in Kentucky. Over the years, the United States Playing Card Company acquired most of the brands. The company also prints custom decks for casinos and other clients around the world.
French Suits
The suits and face cards are French in origin. During the 14th century, playing cards were already being used all throughout Europe, and each country had their own unique suits. The cards we currently use all over the world today originated in France. The French suits of spades, hearts, clubs and diamonds, however, stuck because of their geometric simplicity, solid color and ease of printing. The French are also the ones who reduced the court cards from four per suit to three.
No Joking
In the 1800s, before poker became the most popular card game in the world, Americans were obsessed with a game called "euchre." In this game, there was a German "juker" card that designers eventually twisted into a "joker," adding bells and floppy hats to the design. The jokers have been standard features of decks ever since.
Death and Taxes
In 1862 the law changed, allowing printers to design their own Aces. In "The Hochman Encyclopedia of American Playing Cards," the Dawsons write that companies quickly used their ace as a built-in trademark affirming the brand. If you’ve ever looked at an Ace of Spades and thought, "This card stands out more than the rest of them," it’s because it’s supposed to. The symbol used to be a tax stamp England imprinted on decks of cards so buyers could prove they paid the tax on them.
Imperial Orb
The King of Clubs is supposed to be holding an imperial orb with his other hand. The orb held by the King of Clubs is thought to be Alexander’s. Bad replications and print runs basically obscured the hand holding it. Now, the orb looks like a badge or part of the royal robes.
Depressed King
The King of Hearts is often referred to as the "suicide king" because it looks like he’s plunging his dagger directly into the back of his head. But, this is completely wrong. Due to printing errors, it looks that way, but he’s actually supposed to be raising his sword for battle.
One-Eyed King
There is also a one-eyed king, and he’s not grabbing his weapon.The King of Diamonds is the only king who doesn’t have both of his eyes showing on the card. An online casino said gamblers know that the king is not actually a king, but a god. In Norse mythology, the god Odin only had one eye, and he’s depicted on cards as being ready to strike down an opponent at the snap of his fingers.
The story of David Reimer is a terribly sad one. Born to Janet and Ronald Reimer on August 22, 1965, he had to undergo a transformation that he had no say in when he was just a baby. For fourteen years since his birth, he was brought up as a girl and made to attend traumatic, therapy sessions for sex reassignment. It all came out when, in 1997, Milton Diamond, a sexologist, convinced David to tell his story to discourage doctors from doing the same to other children. After that, he went public about his predicament through Rolling Stone magazine, and later a book named As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girlwas published. Here is the story of David’s life and how what he had to go through finally drove him to suicide.
When still a baby, David Reimer, born Bruce Reimer, was circumcised on April 27, 1966 to correct a condition called “phimosis”. However, the surgery failed resulting in irreparable damage to his penis.
Bruce Reimer and his identical twin Brian Reimer were taken to a urologist by his parents when they noticed something abnormal when the boys urinated. They were both diagnosed with phimosis and referred for circumcision at the age of just seven months. Phimosis is a condition in which the foreskin of a penis cannot be pulled back resulting in balloon-like swelling during urination and pain during erection but otherwise is harmless. The surgery was first performed on Bruce using the unconventional method of cauterization. Bruce’s penis was badly burnt during the operation and was beyond surgical repair. So, the doctors chose not to operate on his brother Brian whose phimosis corrected itself without any surgery.
In 1967, worried about his future, Bruce’s parents consulted psychologist John Money who claimed that Bruce was more likely to have a successful and functional sexual life as a girl. He persuaded them to let Bruce undergo sex reassignment surgery.
John Money was a psychologist at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, Maryland who was gaining fame as a pioneer in the field of sexual development and gender identity based on his research on intersex patients. Money was a supporter of the “Theory of Gender Neutrality” and believed that gender identity was a result of social learning and could be changed through behavioral intervention. After seeing his interview on TV in February 1967, the Reimers took Bruce to see Money. Money and his team persuaded the Reimers to believe that sex reassignment surgery was the best option for Bruce.
At twenty-two months of age, Bruce underwent surgery in which his testes were removed and a vulva was created. He was renamed “Brenda,” and Money provided psychological support for the reassignment which also served as an opportunity to further his research.
After the reassignment and surgery, Money continued to see Bruce every year for consultations and assessments. For Money, Bruce was the perfect test case for gender identity as a socially learned aspect of a person’s sense of self-identity. His brother Brian Raimer made an ideal control subject as the brothers shared genes, family environment, and womb. Also, Bruce was the first male infant with no prenatal or postnatal sexual abnormalities on whom sex reassignment and reconstruction surgery were performed.
According to Bruce, the twins were forced to enact sexual acts which Money reasoned was all part of healthy childhood sexual exploration that leads to adult gender identity. By the time he was thirteen, Bruce developed suicidal depression which led to discontinuation of therapy.
Bruce said that Money forced him to assume the female role going on all fours while Brian had to make thrusting movements with his crotch against Bruce’s buttocks, or have Bruce spread his legs with Brian on top. They were also made to take their clothes off to explore each other’s genitals. On at least one occasion, Money took a photograph of them during these acts. Though Money wrote that Bruce exhibited clearly female behavior, according to the notes from a former student at his lab, his parents had lied about the success of these experiments.
Since the surgery and until his teenage years, Bruce had to urinate through a hole in his abdomen and was given estrogen to encourage breast development. His parents discontinued follow up visits when Money pressured them for another surgery to construct a vagina. At age thirteen, Bruce developed suicidal depression and threatened to kill himself if there were to be any more visits to Money. On March 14, 1980, his parents told him the truth about his gender after which he decided to reassume his male identity and changed his name to David.
On May 4, 2004, overwhelmed by the problems he was facing, David shot himself in the head with a sawed-off shotgun in a grocery store’s parking lot.
David had undergone numerous surgeries to reconstruct his penis and have his breasts surgically removed by 1987. He also started taking testosterone injections. He married Jane Fontaine on September 22, 1990, and adopted her three children. However, his brother Brian suffered from schizophrenia after the experiments and died due to an overdose of antidepressants on July 1, 2002. Adding the difficult relationship with his family and his brother’s death was his unemployment. On May 2, 2004, his wife told him she wanted to separate, and two days later David committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. [source: wikipedia]
This monkey experiment demonstrates how primates react to unequal pay. Read on and see how they show senseof fairness.
In a groundbreaking behavioural experiment conducted by primatologist Frans de Waal, two capuchin monkeys were given a simple task and rewarded on the basis of it.
The first round was relatively simple. The monkeys only had to hand over a few rocks from the pile in their cage to the assistant. When they successfully completed the task, they were given a piece of cucumber. As long as both monkeys were rewarded equally, they were perfectly satisfied with receiving cucumbers as a reward.
This is when the researchers introduced a little twist to the perfectly structured task-reward system. When the monkey on the right is given a grape instead of cucumber, the partner on the left notices. She does not protest just yet, cautiously carrying out a test of her own. Accepting the first piece of cucumber, she waits patiently to see how her partner is rewarded. Sure enough, when she receives the grape again, the outrage begins. She flings back the piece of cucumber at the assistant, demanding – in typical primate fashion – to re-evaluate our concept of fairness and inequality.
Philosophers over the years have heatedly denied that the pillars of morality are an entirely human construct. Consequently, they reasoned, morality cannot exist when the capacity for rhetoric is absent. Social experiments such as this have proved that claim to be false and reeking of bias. As of now, there is ample evidence that moral behaviour is not limited to the domain of humanity. Qualities of fairness, empathy, reciprocity and even empathy can be seen explicitly demonstrated by primates and other species.
“I think morality is much more than what I’ve been talking about,but it would be impossible without these ingredientsthat we find in other primates,which are empathy and consolation,pro-social tendencies and reciprocity and a sense of fairness.”
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