19 Things I Learned About Bulgaria

The first time I traveled through Bulgaria, I knew it wasn’t enough. So I came back for round two. I love these kind of countries- ones ultimately over-looked by most of the world as a country of interest. In countries like Bulgaria, i feel like it’s more of the “wild west”, more free, fewer rules and regulations, and fewer tourists.

From a traveler’s standpoint though, it seems like a great shame that more people flock to the neighboring Turkey and Greece, where it is much more developed and expensive, when they can potentially find something just as amazing in Bulgaria, Macedonia, Albania…. Heck, all over the Balkans! When you are here, it’s a whole different feel.

You sort of have a slight apprehension going there in the first place: it having a name synonymous with all kinds of wars. And you definitely feel like you’re on the “other side” of Europe, as everything is in Cyrillic and not revolving around you, the tourist. That said, I think this made it all the more better for me! It’s an awesome place, and I’m glad it is how it is. It probably wont be this way forever, so I think you should see it now. Until then, here are things I learned about Bulgaria!



1. Bulgaria brought the world the Cyrillic alphabet – which today is used in Russia and throughout the Balkans and other Slavic nations. It was invented by two monks during the First Bulgarian Empire

2. ancient Roman influence on Bulgaria is still evident in many of the cities,. You’ll find Roman baths in Varna, ruins in Sofia, and a mostly-in-tact Roman theater in Plovdiv

3. Bulgaria is apparently the birthplace of yoghurt, and the stuff is everywhere. Not only are there about 300 varieties in supermarkets, but there’s also yoghurt in many of Bulgaria’s signature dishes.

3. The roses grown in Bulgaria’s “Rose Valley” produce most (70-85%) of the world’s rose oil – a component in most perfumes.

facts about bulgaria

4. On the first day of March each year, Bulgarians exchange red-and-white woven bracelets with each other. They wear these Martenitsi bracelets throughout the month, until they see a stork or a blooming tree. Then, the bracelets are tied to trees as a way of welcoming springtime. This is a holiday of sorts, called Baba Marta (“Grandmother March”), and celebrates the passing of winter.

5. Bulgaria has two major ranges – the Balkan Mountains and the Rhodope Mountains – and a few smaller ranges, including the Rila and Pirin mountains. Because of all these mountains, Bulgarian towns like Bansko have become very popular for winter sports. (and cheap!)

6. It has the world’s largest IMAX 3D cinema.

7. After the collapse of a Roman bridge in the 4th Century there was no crossing of the Danube between Romania and Bulgaria for 1,600 years.

8. Though small in area, Bulgaria ranks third in Europe in biodiversity, with a number of rare and endemic species. More than 700 brown bears, 1,000 wolves, golden jackal, wild cats, common otters, souslik and 37 species of reptiles can be found here

9. A must see when travelling to the country is The Rila Cross, which is one of the many unique things in Bulgaria. It’s a wooden cross with 140 microscopic scenes from the Bible featuring more than 1,500 figures; the largest of them is no bigger than a grain of rice.

10. A third of Bulgaria is forested. (hence the biodiversity)

11. For More Than 700 Years, Bulgaria Was Nearly Twice Its Current Size

12. Michael Palin upset Bulgarians by saying it is most famous for it’s gypsies

13. Mastika, a 47% proof spirit made with tree resin, is a popular drink. Average price of a lager is less than $1.

14. The country is one of the world’s biggest winemakers – 200,000 tonnes a year.

15. Bulgarians invented the first electronic computer, digital watch and car air bag.

16. Bulgaria’s most famous footballers are Hristo Stoichkov, now 45 – highest scorer at the 1994 World Cup – and Manchester United’s Dimitar Berbatov, 32.

17. Bulgaria Has The 2nd Most Mineral Springs In Europe, just behind Iceland.

18. Plovdiv is Europe’s Oldest Inhabited City, even older than Athens

19. Bulgarians shake their heads to mean yes and nod for no. Not kidding.

SOME INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT BULGARIA

European names

FEMALE

 MALE

Which is your country/name?

Top 15 Most Evil Nazis

The Third Reich, 1933-1945, was arguably the most heinous regime in history. Comprised of some equally malevolent characters, this administration was responsible for initiating the biggest and most costly war mankind has ever known, and perpetrated one of the worlds biggest acts of genocide, in what is now referred to as the Holocaust. This list could have been bigger but I settled on these 15 (mostly) NSDAP members.

15.Hermann Goering

 

 

 

A WW1 veteran, the Reichsmarschall was head of the luftwaffe, and the founder of the gestapo. After the fall of France he stole millions of pounds worth of art from Jews, and amassed a personal fortune. Goering took part in the beer hall putsch of 1923 and was wounded in the groin. Subsequently, taking morphine for pain relief, he became addicted to the drug for the rest of his life. In 1940, the Marshal ordered the bombing of the civilian population of Britain (the Blitz) and was involved in planning the holocaust. Goering was the highest ranking defendant during the Nuremberg Trials. Sentenced to hang, he committed suicide in his cell the night before his execution by cyanide ingestion.

14.Ilse Koch

 

 

 

 

Known as The “Bitch of Buchenwald” because of her sadistic cruelty towards prisoners, Ilse Koch was married to another wicked Nazi SS, Karl Otto Koch, but outshone him in the depraved, inhumane, disregard for life which was her trademark. She used her sexual prowess by wandering around the camps naked, with a whip, and if any man so much as glanced at her she would have them shot on the spot. The most infamous accusation against Ilse Koch was that she had selected inmates with interesting tattoos to be killed, so that their skins could be made into lampshades for her home (though, unfortunately, no evidence of these lampshades has been found). After the war she was arrested and spent time in prison on different charges, eventually hanging herself in her cell in 1967, apparently consumed by guilt.

 

13.Joseph Goebbels

 

 

 

 

Dr. Paul Josef Goebbels was the Reich Minister of Propaganda, and a vehement antisemite. Goebbels speeches of hatred against Jews arguably initiated the final solution, and no doubt helped sway public opinion to the detriment of the Jewish people. A sufferer of polio, Goebbels had a club foot, but this did not effect his standing as the second best orator in The Reich. He coined the phrase “Total War”, and was instrumental in convincing the nation to fight long after the war was effectively lost. At the end of the war, a devoted Goebbels stayed in Berlin with Hitler and killed himself, along with his wife Magda and their six young children.

 

12.Franz Stangl

 

 

 







Born in Austria, Stangl was a commandant of the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps. In 1940, through a direct order from Heinrich Himmler, Stangl became superintendent of the T-4 Euthanasia Program at the Euthanasia Institute at Schloss Hartheim where mentally and physically disabled people were sent to be killed. Stangl accepted, and grew accustomed to the killing of Jews , perceiving prisoners not as humans but merely as “cargo”. He is quoted as saying, “I remember standing there, next to the pits full of black-blue corpses…. somebody said ‘What shall we do with rotting garbage?’ that started me thinking of them as cargo. Stangl escaped Germany after the war and was eventually arrested in Brazil, in 1967. He was tried for the deaths of around 900,000 people. He admitted to these killings, but argued: “My conscience is clear. I was simply doing my duty”. He died of heart failure in 1971, while serving a life sentence.

11.Paul Blobel

 

 



During the German invasion of the Soviet Union, he commanded Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C, that was active in Ukraine. Following Wehrmacht troops into Ukraine, the Einsatzgruppen would be responsible for liquidating political and racial undesirables. Blobel was primarily responsible for the Babi Yar massacre at Kiev. Up to 59,018 executions are attributable to Blobel, though during testimony he was alleged to have killed 10,000-15,000. He was later sentenced to death by the U.S. Nuremberg Military Tribunal in the Einsatzgruppen Trial. He was hanged at Landsberg Prison on June 8, 1951.

10.Josef Kramer

 

 



Kramer was the Commandant of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Dubbed “The Beast of Belsen” by camp inmates; he was a notorious Nazi war criminal, directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of people. Kramer adopted his own draconian policies at Auschwitz and Belsen and, along with Irma Grese, he terrorized his prisoners without remorse. After the war he was convicted of war crimes and hanged in Hameln prison by noted British executioner Albert Pierrepoint. Whilst on trial he stated his lack of feelings as he was “just following orders”.

9.Ernst Kaltenbrunner

 

 

 

 

  Austrian born Kaltenbrunner was chief of security in the Reich where he replaced Reinhard Heydrich. He was president of Interpol from 1943 to 1945, and was there to destroy the enemies within the Reich. Kaltenbrunner was a physically imposing man with scars on his cheeks, which made him look like the tyrant he really was. Kaltenbrunner was one of the main perpetrators of the holocaust and he was hanged after the Nuremberg trials on 16th October 1946. He was the highest ranked SS man to be hanged.

 

 8.Friedrich Jeckeln 

 

Jeckeln led one of the largest collections of Einsatzgruppen, and was personally responsible for ordering the deaths of over 100,000 Jews, Slavs, Roma, and other “undesirables” of the Third Reich, in the occupied Soviet Union during World War II. Jeckeln developed his own methods to kill large numbers of people, which became known as the “Jeckeln System” during the Rumbula, Babi Yar, and Kamianets-Podilskyi Massacres. After the war he was tried and hanged by the Russian,s in Riga on February 3, 1946.

 

7.Oskar Dirlewanger

 

WW1 veteran Dr. Oskar Dirlewanger led the infamous SS Dirlewanger Brigade, a penal battalion comprised of the sickest most vicious criminals in the Riech. Dirlwanger raped two 13 year old girls on separate occasions in the 1930s, and lost his Dr. title after being imprisoned, only to have it reinstated after his bravery Fighting in the Spanish Civil War. He volunteered for the SS at the start of WW2, and was given his own battalion due to his excellent soldiery, Dirlewanger’s unit was employed in operations against partisans in the occupied Soviet Union, but he and his soldiers are widely believed to have tortured, raped and murdered civilians (including children) and he allegedly fed female hostages strychnine in order to entertain his soldiers whilst they died in agony. Dirlewanger was captured by the French in a hospital after being injured at the front as he had always led his soldiers into battle. The French handed him over to the Polish, who locked him up and beat and tortured him over the next few days. He died from injuries inflicted by the Polish guards around June 5, 1945.

6.Odilo Globocnik

Odilo Globocnik was a prominent Austrian Nazi, and later an SS leader. He was one of the men most responsible for the murder of millions of people during the Holocaust. Globocnik was responsible for liquidating the Warsaw Ghetto, which contained about 500,000 Jews, the largest Jewish community in Europe, and the second largest in the world, after New York. He is also known for liquidating the Bialystok Ghetto, which stood out for its strong resistance to German occupation and resettling a large quantity of Poles under the premise of ethnic cleansing. He was in charge of the implementation and supervision of the Lublin reservation, to which 95,000 Jews were deported, with its adjacent network of forced labour camps in the Lublin district. He was also in charge of over 45,000 Jewish laborers. On May 21st, Shortly after capture, Globocnik committed suicide by means of a cyanide capsule hidden in his mouth.

5.Adolf Eichmann

Eichmann was the organizational talent that orchestrated the mass deportation of Jews from their countries into waiting ghettos and extermination camps. A prodigy of Heydrich, he is sometimes referred to as “the architect of the Holocaust”. He learned Hebrew and studied all things Jewish in order to manipulate Jews, through his power of coercion, to leave their occupied territories and possessions in favor of a better life in the ghettos. At the end of the war he was doing the same to Hungarian Jews and, if it wasn’t for the intervention of Raoul Wallenberg, the number of victims of the holocaust would have been much higher. He fled Germany at the end of the war via a ratline to south America, and was captured by the Mossad in Argentina. He was extradited to Israel and executed by hanging in 1962, after a highly publicized trial. Eichmanns death was, and is, the only civil execution ever carried out in Israel.

4.Joseph Mengele

 

Mengele initially gained notoriety for being one of the SS physicians who supervised the selection of arriving transports of prisoners, determining who was to be killed and who was to become a forced laborer, but is far more infamous for performing grisly human experiments on camp inmates, for which Mengele was called the “Angel of Death”. His crimes were evil and of many. When it was reported that one hospital block was infested with lice, Mengele gassed every single one of the 750 women assigned to it. Mengele used Auschwitz as an opportunity to continue his research on heredity, using inmates for human experimentation. He was particularly interested in identical twins. Mengele’s experiments included attempts to take one twin’s eyeballs and attach them to the back of the other twin’s head, changing eye color by injecting chemicals into children’s eyes, various amputations of limbs, and other brutal surgeries. He survived the war, and after a period living incognito in Germany, he fled to South America, where he evaded capture for the rest of his life, despite being hunted as a Nazi war criminal.

3.Reinhard Heydrich

 

Heydrich was appointed Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. In August 1940, he was appointed and served as President of Interpol. Heydrich chaired the 1942 Wannsee Conference, which discussed plans for the deportation and extermination of all Jews in German occupied territory, thus being the mastermind of the holocaust. He was attacked by British trained Czech agents on 27 May, 1942, sent to assassinate him in Prague. He died slightly over a week later from complications arising from his injuries. The foundations of genocide were laid by Heydrich and carried out in Operation Reinhard in his name.

2.Adolf Hitler

 

 

Hitler would be some people’s choice to be number one but not mine. Adolf Hitler went from being a lance corporal in the German army, to chancellor of Germany in 15 years. The holocaust may have been his subordinates doing, but he knew about it, which, amazingly, has only been fairly recently proven. Adolf Hitler had a major role in initiating the bloodiest conflict ever, which still has a massive bearing on the world to this day. His megalomania saw large parts of Europe devastated in his lifetime and forced into communism after the war.

 

1.Heinrich Himmler

 

Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the holocaust and considered to be the biggest mass murderer ever, by some (although it’s really Josef Stalin). The holocaust would not have happened if not for this man. He tried to breed a master race of Nordic appearance, the Aryan race. His plans for racial purity were ended by Hitler’s vanity in making rash military decisions rather than letting his generals make them, thus ending the war prematurely. Himmler was captured after the war. He unsuccessfully tried to negotiate with the west, and was genuinely shocked to be treated as a criminal upon capture. He committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide capsule he had bit upon.

 





Some of the weird bans around the world.

1. Western haircut in Iran. Like most of the middle east, Iran also doesn’t want western culture to influence their culture. In Europe,to save the people from the American influence,Iran has banned western haircut in Europe. These haircuts include Mulatis, ponytail and spikes.

2. Emo clothing in Russia. Russia government has banned emo fashion in Russia. The reason behind the ban is the increase in suicide cases in Russia.

3. Avatar in 2D in China. China was not satisfied with the idea of the American army in the film Avatar, so China decided to the film will only be showed in 3D in China, knowing there are less number of 3D theatres in China.4. Names of children in Denmark. Denmark has strict guidelines about keeping the names of the children. People in Denmark can keep the name of their children by seeing the names in the list given by the government which has around 24000 names in it.

5. Video games in Greece. Greece banned video games in 2002, the reason was to keep a ban on electronic gambling machine. After one year, due to the pressures of Europian union and youth this ban was removed.

6. Valentines day in Saudi Arabia. Valentines day is not celebrated in Saudi Arabia. There it is believed that it is beyond the muslim principles. A day before valentines day all the things of red color are removed in the shops.

Lately you may have been seeing some “radiation” maps from NOAA showing what is supposed to be the Nuclear Radiation that has spread across the globe. But is that really the correct information about the Fukushima nuclear radiation spreading across the Pacific Ocean? These maps seemed familiar to me, so I looked a little deeper into what they were. I also thought that it was a little odd that the maps only showed the radiation over the ocean, as if air sampling was not possible over land, or that NOAA didn’t care to report it.

Fukushima Nuclear Radiation Spreading Across The Pacific Ocean?

Here is a version of the map that has been circulating the web, along with the hype that this is the radioactive Cesium leaking out of the Fukushima reactor over the last 2 years:

Fukushima NOAA Radiation Plume?

I looked back through some older images from NOAA that helped me identify that my “hunch” was correct. While I am not trying to disprove that the world’s governments are trying to cover up this ecological disaster, I would at least like to shed some light on the “evidence” that is being reported elsewhere. It is still most likely that the Fukushima reactor leaked enough harmful radiation into the atmosphere to spread across the Pacific Ocean in measurable amounts. You may recall the desperate attempts in the days following the 2011 tsunami that struck the Eastern coast of Japan. Helicopters attempted to poor sea water onto the open reactor to prevent it from overheating any further, meanwhile deadly radiation levels leaked carelessly out of the damaged facility.

Now take a look at this map below, from a different perspective. This map was the Tsunami Wave Height predictive index set out by NOAA prior to the tsunami landing on the shores of Japan. You will notice the same exact pattern and colors used. Also notice on the other map that the Legend is also in (CM) Centimeters. Do they even measure nuclear radiation in Centimeters? Most maps would also contain a title, so that we would be able to understand the context of the map as well.

Either someone out there misread the above map, or they intentionally are spreading it with misinformation in hopes of furthering their cause for spreading panic. While there is truth to the radiation leak and it spreading across the Pacific, it probably does not reach quite as far as the map suggests, and would also not conveniently stop once it reaches land.

2011 Japan Tsunami Wave Height

Notice that even though the above map is a 3D satellite map, it’s legend is in the same 0-240 cm scale as the 2D map up top. Also, the coloring and patterns match up perfectly with the 2D map as well. When taking in a map as evidence, be sure to check all of the relevant information available on the map to tell what it is illustrating. Do you still think that the map circulating the Internet is really showing the Fukushima nuclear radiation spreading across the Pacific Ocean?

The 15 Celebrities Who Looked Awkward in Their Teens

#15 Kate Moss

Who’s this girl? Of course, it’s Kate Moss. Looking at this funny picture, it’s hard to believe that 20 year later, this girl will become the second on the top-earning models list compiled by Forbes. She has earned 9.2 million in just one year! If only this teen girl knew that….

#14 Zooey Deschanel

This picture is taken from Deschanel’s seventh-grade yearbook. The 14-year-old girl just lost ten pounds and tried to grow out her bangs, because she wanted to get a new look. Even though, now the “New Girl” actress says that is was the worst year of her life, her intention to grow her bangs seem to be just perfect. Now the bangs are her signature look.

#13 Jennifer Garner

Of course, we all have tons of imperfections when we are in our teens. So did Jennifer Garner. Just imagine – this girl will later get married to Ben Affleck and have 3 children with him. Not bad.

#12 Jennifer Aniston

Oh hello, Jen! Long before Jennifer Aniston became a sitcom superstar and hot bodied girl, she was a teenager living in Manhattan and dreaming about a career in acting. Even though one drama teacher told her that she was a “disgrace to theater,” Forbes rated her as one of the top 10 richest women in entertainment in 2007… And she was married to Brad Pitt! But don’t you think, Jen is a bit complicated? Yes, we do too….

#11 Beyoncé

This picture is taken from her 8th grade year book. Beyoncé attended Welch Middle School in Houston, Texas. She is just 13 years old in this picture. What can we say? Unlike most high school kids who are not lucky to have bad skin, breakouts or braces, this girl always knew how to smile and be camera ready.

#10 Brad Pitt

Even the world’s most desired man went through that awkward phase. Though, he could still boast that he looked really good even in his teens. We bet, Brad Pitt was quite a heartthrob then too!

#9 Ellen DeGeneres

It was long before Ellen came out publicly about being a lesbian, and, of course, before she got married to Portia de Rossi. She was just a teenager, who studied at the University of New Orleans and was an emcee at Clyde’s Comedy Club in New Orleans. We would love to see Ellen doing a monologue about this outfit.

#8 Taylor Lautner

The 21-year-old actor is not far away from his teens…. But we should say, Taylor Lautner is a really smart teenager. The success after the Twilight films made him too busy to attend the school, so he took the California High School Proficiency Exam to graduate from high school in 2008. Just imagine how it would have been like if he attended this school!

#7 Avril Lavigne

This girl was very successful during her teen years. By the time Avril Lavigne was 16, she had been signed to Arista Records and started working on her first major album release. Her album “Let Go” debuted at number two in the US charts and climbed to the top spot in the UK, setting a record as the youngest female soloist to do so. But she wasn’t always the skater girl, that’s for sure!

#6 Angelina Jolie

Why do you look so scared, Angie? Maybe, you have just dropped your acting classes and decided to become a funeral director? Or maybe, you have just bought a new knife to play with? Anyways, Angelina Jolie was a very unpredictable teenager…. Nothing changed when she became an adult though. Who knows, perhaps she is still at heart – and always will be – a punk with tattoos.

#5 Gwen Stefani

Can't imagine Gwen Stefani without her trademark red lips and ultra-blonde locks? Well, it seems like she started as a fresh-faced, sandy-haired teenager! There's no sign of the punk chick who made it big with her band in the mid 90s. Crazy, huh?

#4 Charlize Theron

Can you believe that this gorgeous woman was not popular in the high school? Actress Charlize Theron said in an interview that she wore nerdy glasses as she was almost blind. Boys didn’t like her. Though, she developed a thick skin and a strong ambition. By 19, she had already a year-long contract in Milan. And then became a star. Poor guys from her high school!

#3 Lady Gaga

Meet Stefani Germanotta. Back in the 90s she was a teenager who suffered from bulimia and had a lot of body-image issues. Well, she still struggles with her weight issues, but we should say, her natural makeup really fits her….

#2 Megan Fox

If you are not a fan of Megan Fox, try to convince us that she’s not hot. Even though we understand that she is one of the most overrated women of our time, she still looks pretty hot. But who cares? Pictures of her from her college years don’t help. She is as gorgeous as she can be. Questions?

#1 Justin Timberlake

Justin Timberlake was a cheater in his teens! According to his first girlfriend, Veronica Finn, he might have cheated to her even though he loved her. She was 16, and NSYNC star was 17 when they dated. Needless to say, there was a huge temptation for girls to get to know him since he was a super cutie and super successful….

Driving in the storm at night!

30 Things To Do Before You Die

Most bucket lists include things like, "Go on an adventure in a far-off land," "Learn a new language," or "Buy a dream car." Although all these experiences can make our lives more exciting, the reason we crave these activities goes a little deeper.

What drives each of these desires is one common connector, an innate yearning to belong and to feel love. When we do what we love, we become an expression of love and our happiness is infectious.

As I check off my own adventure list — skydiving, going swimming with wild dolphins, climbing Mayan Ruins in Belize — I find that with each activity I complete, I feel a sense of accomplishment, purpose and self-worth.

Which led me to think about our human desire to make a difference and live life more fully. All of us want the same thing: to be happy and live a wonderful life. But how we meet this need often differs from person to person.

In the spirit of loving life to the fullest, I've revised my list of things to do before I die. These seemingly simple acts have transformed my life. What it comes down to is not how long your life is, but how wide you live it and these 30 ideas can help.

30 things to do before you die:

1. Stop worrying about debt.

2. Forgive your ex-lovers.

3. Stop trying to control your outcome.

4. Look in the mirror and love yourself unconditionally.

5. Leave the job you hate.

6. Find your purpose and live it full heartedly.

7. Adopt a furry friend.

8. Don't feel guilty for holiday weight gain.

9. Trust that everything is in right order.

10. Travel to the place you keep thinking about.

11. Try something that scares you daily.

12. Be open to change.

13. Let go of your past.

14. Stop trying to change people.

15. Stop looking for answer outside of yourself.

16. Stop thinking you did something wrong.

17. Be your weird, crazy, beautiful self.

18. Follow your heart.

19. Risk everything for love.

20. Reject rejection.

21. See the world as a beautiful, safe, and loving place.

22. See everyone as equals.

23. Give up all attachments to stuff.

24. Recognize the journey is the reward.

25. Stay hopeful and optimistic in difficult situations.

26. Welcome all life lessons.

27. See the opportunities in every challenge rather than give up.

28. Live your values.

29. Inspire others by your own bigness.

30. Play with the world.

Fight at the Prom night of the National   commerce-bank school in Sofia Bulgaria

THE TOP 20 MOST BIZARRE EXPERIMENTS OF ALL TIME

1: Elephants on Acid

What happens if you give an elephant LSD? On Friday August 3, 1962, a group of Oklahoma City researchers decided to find out.
Warren Thomas, Director of the City Zoo, fired a cartridge-syringe containing 297 milligrams of LSD into Tusko the Elephant's rump. With Thomas were two scientific colleagues from the University of Oklahoma School of Medicine, Louis Jolyon West and Chester M. Pierce.297 milligrams is a lot of LSD — about 3000 times the level of a typical human dose. In fact, it remains the largest dose of LSD ever given to a living creature. The researchers figured that, if they were going to give an elephant LSD, they better not give him too little.Thomas, West, and Pierce later explained that the experiment was designed to find out if LSD would induce musth in an elephant — musth being a kind of temporary madness male elephants sometimes experience during which they become highly aggressive and secrete a sticky fluid from their temporal glands. But one suspects a small element of ghoulish curiosity might also have been involved.Whatever the reason for the experiment, it almost immediately went awry. Tusko reacted to the shot as if a bee had stung him. He trumpeted around his pen for a few minutes, and then keeled over on his side. Horrified, the researchers tried to revive him, but about an hour later he was dead. The three scientists sheepishly concluded that, "It appears that the elephant is highly sensitive to the effects of LSD."In the years that followed controversy lingered over whether it was the LSD that killed Tusko, or the drugs used to revive him. So twenty years later, Ronald Siegel of UCLA decided to settle the debate by giving two elephants a dose similar to what Tusko received. Reportedly he had to sign an agreement promising to replace the animals in the event of their deaths.Instead of injecting the elephants with LSD, Siegel mixed the drug into their water, and when it was administered in this way, the elephants not only survived but didn't seem too upset at all. They acted sluggish, rocked back and forth, and made some strange vocalizations such as chirping and squeaking, but within a few hours they were back to normal. However, Siegel noted that the dosage Tusko received may have exceeded some threshold of toxicity, so he couldn't rule out that LSD was the cause of his death. The controversy continues.


#2: Obedience

Imagine that you've volunteered for an experiment, but when you show up at the lab you discover the researcher wants you to murder an innocent person. You protest, but the researcher firmly states, "The experiment requires that you do it." Would you acquiesce and kill the person?When asked what they would do in such a situation, almost everyone replies that of course they would refuse to commit murder. But Stanley Milgram's famous obedience experiment, conducted at Yale University in the early 1960s, revealed that this optimistic belief is wrong. If the request is presented in the right way, almost all of us quite obediently become killers.Milgram told subjects they were participating in an experiment to determine the effect of punishment on learning. One volunteer (who was, in reality, an actor in cahoots with Milgram) would attempt to memorize a series of word pairs. The other volunteer (the real subject) would read out the word pairs and give the learner an electric shock every time he got an answer wrong. The shocks would increase in intensity by fifteen volts with each wrong answer.The experiment began. The learner started getting some wrong answers, and pretty soon the shocks had reached 120 volts. At this point the learner started crying out, "Hey, this really hurts." At 150 volts the learner screamed in pain and demanded to be let out. Confused, the volunteers turned around and asked the researcher what they should do. He always calmly replied, "The experiment requires that you continue."Milgram had no interest in the effect of punishment on learning. What he really wanted to see was how long people would keep pressing the shock button before they refused to participate any further. Would they remain obedient to the authority of the researcher up to the point of killing someone?To Milgram's surprise, even though volunteers could plainly hear the agonized cries of the learner echoing through the walls of the lab from the neighboring room, two-thirds of them continued to press the shock button all the way up to the end of scale, 450 volts, by which time the learner had fallen into an eerie silence, apparently dead. Milgram's subjects sweated and shook, and some laughed hysterically, but they kept pressing the button. Even more disturbingly, when volunteers could neither see nor hear feedback from the learner, compliance with the order to give ever greater shocks was almost 100%.Milgram later commented, "I would say, on the basis of having observed a thousand people in the experiment and having my own intuition shaped and informed by these experiments, that if a system of death camps were set up in the United States 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."

#3: Demikhov’s Two-Headed Dogs

In 1954 Vladimir Demikhov shocked the world by unveiling a surgically created monstrosity: A two-headed dog. He created the creature in a lab on the outskirts of Moscow by grafting the head, shoulders, and front legs of a puppy onto the neck of a mature German shepherd.
Demikhov paraded the dog before reporters from around the world. Journalists gasped as both heads simultaneously lapped at bowls of milk, and then cringed as the milk from the puppy's head dribbled out the unconnected stump of its esophageal tube. The Soviet Union proudly boasted that the dog was proof of their nation's medical preeminence.Over the course of the next fifteen years, Demikhov created a total of twenty of his two-headed dogs. None of them lived very long, as they inevitably succumbed to problems of tissue rejection. The record was a month.Demikhov explained that the dogs were part of a continuing series of experiments in surgical techniques, with his ultimate goal being to learn how to perform a human heart and lung transplant. Another surgeon beat him to this goal — Dr. Christian Baarnard in 1967 — but Demikhov is widely credited with paving the way for it.[On YouTube: See a Russian-language film about Demikhov.]


#4: The Initiation of Heterosexual Behavior in a Homosexual Male 

In 1954 James Olds and Peter Milner of McGill University discovered that the septal region is the feel-good center of the brain. Electrical stimulation of it produces sensations of intense pleasure and sexual arousal. They demonstrated their discovery by inserting wires into a rat's brain and then showing that when the rat figured out it could self-stimulate itself by pressing a lever, it would maniacally bang on that lever up to two-thousand times an hour. (The image at the very top of this page, third from the right, shows one of Olds and Milner's rats banging on its lever.)
In 1970, Robert Heath of Tulane University dreamed up a far more novel application of Olds and Milner's discovery. Heath decided to test whether repeated stimulation of the septal region could transform a homosexual man into a heterosexual.Heath referred to his homosexual subject as patient B-19. He inserted Teflon-insulated electrodes into the septal region of B-19's brain and then gave B-19 carefully controlled amounts of stimulation in experimental sessions. Soon the young man was reporting increased stirrings of sexual motivation. Heath then rigged up a device to allow B-19 to self-stimulate himself. It was like letting a chocoholic loose in a candy shop. B-19 quickly became obsessed with the pleasure button. In one three-hour session he pressed it 1500 times until, as Heath noted, "he was experiencing an almost overwhelming euphoria and elation and had to be disconnected."By this stage of the experiment B-19's libido was so jacked up that Heath decided to proceed with the final stage in which B-19 would be introduced to a sexually-willing female partner. With permission from the state attorney general, Heath arranged for a twenty-one-year-old female prostitute to visit the lab, and he placed her in a room with B-19. For an hour B-19 did nothing, but then the prostitute took the initiative and a successful sexual encounter between the two occurred. Heath considered this a positive result.Little is known of B-19's later fate. Heath reported that the young man drifted back into a life of homosexual prostitution, but that he also had an affair with a married woman. Heath optimistically decided that this showed the treatment was at least partially successful. However, Heath never did try to convert any more homosexuals.

#5: The Isolated Head of a Dog

What could be more horrific than creating a two-headed dog? What about keeping the severed head of a dog alive apart from its body!
Ever since the carnage of the French Revolution, when the guillotine sent thousands of severed heads tumbling into baskets, scientists had wondered whether it would be possible to keep a head alive apart from its body, but it wasn't until the late 1920s that someone managed to pull off this feat.Soviet physician Sergei Brukhonenko developed a primitive heart-lung machine he called an "autojector," and with this device he succeeded in keeping the severed head of a dog alive. He displayed one of his living dog heads in 1928 before an international audience of scientists at the Third Congress of Physiologists of the USSR. To prove that the head lying on the table really was alive, he showed that it reacted to stimuli. Brukhonenko banged a hammer on the table, and the head flinched. He shone light in its eyes, and the eyes blinked. He even fed the head a piece of cheese, which promptly popped out the esophageal tube on the other end.Brukhonenko's severed dog head became the talk of Europe and inspired the playwright George Bernard Shaw to muse, "I am even tempted to have my own head cut off so that I can continue to dictate plays and books without being bothered by illness, without having to dress and undress, without having to eat, without having anything else to do other than to produce masterpieces of dramatic art and literature."[On YouTube: See Experiments in the revival of organisms.]


#6: Human-Ape Hybrid

For decades dark rumors circulated alleging that the Soviets had conducted experiments to try to create a human-ape hybrid by breeding chimpanzees and humans, but it wasn't until the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of Russian archives that the rumors were confirmed.
Dr. Il'ya Ivanov was a world-renowned expert on veterinary reproductive biology, but he wanted to do more in life than breed fatter cows. So in 1927 he traveled to Africa to pursue his vision of interbreeding man and ape.Thankfully his efforts weren't successful. To a great degree this was due to the native staff of the West Guinea research facility where he worked, from whom he constantly had to conceal the true purpose of his experiments. If they had found out what he was really doing, he wrote in his diary, "this could have led to very unpleasant consequences." The necessity of carrying out his work in secrecy made it almost impossible to do anything, although he did record two unsuccessful attempts to artificially inseminate female chimpanzees with human sperm.Frustrated, Ivanov eventually returned to the Soviet Union. He brought an orangutan named Tarzan back with him, hoping to continue his research in a more accepting environment. Back home he advertised for female volunteers willing to carry Tarzan's child, and remarkably he got a few takers. But then Tarzan died and Ivanov himself was sent off to a prison camp for a couple of years. This ended his research. There are vague rumors suggesting that other Soviet scientists continued Ivanov's work, but nothing definite has been proven.


#7: The Stanford Prison Experiment

Philip Zimbardo was curious about why prisons are such violent places. Is it because of the character of their inhabitants, or is it due to the corrosive effect of the power structure of the prisons themselves?
To find out, Zimbardo created a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology department. He recruited clean-cut young men as volunteers — none had criminal records and all rated "normal" on psychological tests — and he randomly assigned half of them to play the role of prisoners and the other half to play guards. His plan was that he would step back for two weeks and observe how these model citizens interacted with each other in their new roles.What happened next has become the stuff of legend.Social conditions in the mock prison deteriorated with stunning rapidity. On the first night the prisoners staged a revolt, and the guards, feeling threatened by the insubordination of the prisoners, cracked down hard. They began devising creative ways to discipline the prisoners, using methods such as random strip-searches, curtailed bathroom privileges, verbal abuse, sleep deprivation, and the withholding of food.Under this pressure, prisoners began to crack. The first one left after only thirty-six hours, screaming that he felt like he was "burning up inside." Within six days, four more prisoners had followed his lead, one of whom had broken out in a full-body stress-related rash. It was clear that for everyone involved the new roles had quickly become more than just a game.Even Zimbardo himself felt seduced by the corrosive psychology of the situation. He began entertaining paranoid fears that his prisoners were planning a break-out, and he tried to contact the real police for help. Luckily, at this point Zimbardo realized things had gone too far. Only six days had passed, but already the happy college kids who had begun the experiment had transformed into sullen prisoners and sadistic guards.Zimbardo called a meeting the next morning and told everyone they could go home. The remaining prisoners were relieved, but tellingly, the guards were upset. They had been quite enjoying their new-found power and had no desire to give it up.


#8: Facial expressions while decapitating a rat

In 1924 Carney Landis, a graduate student in psychology at the University of Minnesota, designed an experiment to study whether emotions evoke characteristic facial expressions. For instance, is there one expression everyone uses to convey shock, and another commonly used to display disgust?
Most of Landis's subjects were fellow graduate students. He brought them into his lab and painted lines on their faces so that he could more easily see the movement of their muscles. He then exposed them to a variety of stimuli designed to provoke a strong psychological reaction. As they reacted, he snapped pictures of their faces. He made them smell ammonia, look at pornographic pictures, and reach their hand into a bucket containing slimy frogs. But the climax of the experiment arrived when he carried out a live white rat on a tray and asked them to decapitate it.Most people initially resisted his request, but eventually two-thirds did as he ordered. Landis noted that most of them performed the task quite clumsily: "The effort and attempt to hurry usually resulted in a rather awkward and prolonged job of decapitation." For the one-third that refused, Landis eventually picked up the knife and decapitated the rat for them.Landis's experiment presented a stunning display of the willingness of people to obey the demands of experimenters, no matter how bizarre those demands might be. It anticipated the results of Milgram's obedience experiment by almost forty years. However, Landis never realized that the compliance of his subjects was far more interesting than their facial expressions. Landis remained single-mindedly focused on his initial research topic, even though he never was able to match up emotions and expressions. It turns out that people use a wide variety of expressions to convey the same emotion — even an emotion such as disgust at having to decapitate a rat.

#9: The Vomit-Drinking Doctor

How far would you go to prove a theory? Stubbins Ffirth, a doctor-in-training living in Philadelphia during the early nineteenth century, went further than most. Way further.
Having observed that yellow fever ran riot during the summer, but disappeared during the winter, Ffirth concluded that it was not a contagious disease. Instead, he theorized it was caused by an excess of stimulants such as heat, food, and noise.To prove his theory, Ffirth set out to demonstrate that no matter how much he exposed himself to yellow fever, he wouldn't catch it. He started by making small incisions on his arms and pouring "fresh black vomit" obtained from a yellow-fever patient into the cuts. He didn't get sick.Next he dribbled some vomit in his eyes. He fried some up on a skillet and inhaled the fumes. He fashioned some into a pill and swallowed it. Finally he took to drinking entire glasses of pure, undiluted black vomit. And still he didn't get sick.Ffirth rounded out his experiment by liberally smearing himself with other yellow-fever tainted fluids: blood, saliva, perspiration, and urine. Healthy as ever, he declared his theory proven. Unfortunately, he was wrong. Yellow fever is very contagious, but it requires direct transmission into the blood stream, usually by a mosquito, to cause infection. But considering all Ffirth did to infect himself, it is a bit of a miracle he remained alive.


#10: Beneficial Brainwashing

Dr. Ewen Cameron believed he had come up with a cure for schizophrenia. His theory was that the brain could be reprogrammed to think in healthy ways by forcibly imposing new thought patterns on it. His method was to make patients wear headphones and listen to audio messages looped over and over, sometimes for days or even weeks at a time. He called this method "psychic driving," because the messages were being driven into the psyche. The press hailed it as "beneficial brainwashing."
During the 1950s and early 1960s, hundreds of Cameron's patients at Montreal's Allan Memorial Clinic became his unwitting test subjects — whether or not they actually had schizophrenia. Some patients checked in complaining of problems as minor as menopause-related anxiety, only to find themselves sedated with barbiturates, strapped into a bed, and forced to listen for days on end to messages such as "People like you and need you. You have confidence in yourself."One time, to test the technique, Cameron placed patients into a drugged sleep and made them listen to the message, "When you see a piece of paper, you want to pick it up." Later he drove them to a local gymnasium. There, lying in the middle of the gym floor, was a single piece of paper. He happily reported that many of them spontaneously walked over to pick it up.When the CIA learned of what Cameron was doing, it became interested and started surreptitiously channeling him money. But eventually the agency concluded that Cameron's technique was a failure and cut his funding, prompting Cameron himself to admit that his experiments had been "a ten year trip down the wrong road." In the late 1970s a group of Cameron's former patients filed suit against the CIA for its support of his work and reached an out-of-court settlement for an undisclosed amount of money.

#11: Monkey-Head Transplant

When Vladimir Demikhov unveiled his two-headed dogs in 1954, it inspired a strange kind of surgical arms race (or rather, head race) between the two superpowers. Eager to prove that its surgeons were actually the best in the world, the American government began funding the work of Robert White, who then embarked on a series of experimental surgeries, performed at his brain research center in Cleveland, Ohio, resulting in the world's first successful monkey-head transplant.
The head transplant occurred on March 14, 1970. It took White and his assistants hours to perform the carefully choreographed operation, separating a monkey's head from its body and reattaching it to a new body. When the monkey woke and found that its body had been switched for a new one, it angrily tracked White with its eyes and snapped at him with its teeth. The monkey survived a day and a half before succumbing to complications from the surgery. As bad as it was for the monkey, it could have been worse. White noted that, from a surgical point of view, it would have been easier to put the monkey's head on backwards.White thought he should have been treated like a hero, but instead the public was appalled by what he had done. Nevertheless, White soldiered on, campaigning to raise support for a human head transplant. He toured with Craig Vetovitz, a near-quadriplegic, who volunteered to be the first to undergo the procedure. The public is still a long way from accepting the idea of human head transplants, but if White has his way, one day it will happen.

#12: The Remote-Controlled Bull

Yale researcher Jose Delgado stood in the hot sun of a bullring in Cordova, Spain. With him in the ring was a large, angry bull. The animal noticed him and began to charge. It gathered speed. Delgado appeared defenseless, but when the bull was mere feet away, Delgado pressed a button on a remote control unit in his hand, sending a signal to a chip implanted in the bull's brain. Abruptly, the animal stopped in its tracks. It huffed and puffed a few times, and then walked docilely away.
Delgado's experience in the ring was an experimental demonstration of the ability of his "stimoceiver" to manipulate behavior. The stimoceiver was a computer chip, operated by a remote-control unit, that could be used to electrically stimulate different regions of an animal's brain. Such stimulation could produce a wide variety of effects, including the involuntary movement of limbs, the eliciting of emotions such as love or rage, or the inhibition of appetite. It could also be used, as Delgado showed, to stop a charging bull.Delgado's experiment sounds so much like science fiction, that many people are surprised to learn it occurred back in 1963. During the 1970s and 80s, research into electrical stimulation of the brain (ESB) languished, stigmatized by the perception that it represented an effort to control people's minds and thoughts. But more recently, ESB research has once again been flourishing, with reports of researchers creating remote-controlled rats, pigeons, and even sharks.

#13: The Ape and the Child

History contains numerous accounts of children raised by animals. The children in such cases often continue to act more animal than human, even when returned to human society. The psychologist Winthrop Kellogg wondered what would happen if the situation were reversed. What if an animal were raised by humans — as a human. Would it eventually act like a human?
To answer this question, in 1931 Kellogg brought a seven-month-old female chimpanzee named Gua into his home. He and his wife then proceeded to raise her as if she were human, treating her exactly the same as they treated their ten-month-old son Donald.Donald and Gua played together. They were fed together. And the Kelloggs subjected them both to regular tests to track their development. One such test was the suspended cookie test, in which the Kelloggs timed how long it took their children to reach a cookie suspended by a string in the middle of the room.Gua regularly performed better on such tests than Donald, but in terms of language acquisition she was a disappointment. Despite the Kelloggs's repeated efforts, the ability to speak eluded her. Disturbingly, it also seemed to be eluding Donald. Nine months into the experiment, his language skills weren't much better than Gua's. When he one day indicated he was hungry by imitating Gua's "food bark," the Kelloggs decided the experiment had gone far enough. Donald evidently needed some playmates of his own species. So on March 28, 1932 they shipped Gua back to the primate center. She was never heard from again.

#14: “My Fingernails Taste Terribly Bitter”

In the summer of 1942 Professor Lawrence Leshan stood in the darkness of a cabin in an upstate New York camp where a row of young boys lay sleeping. He spoke aloud, repeating a single phrase over and over, "My fingernails taste terribly bitter. My fingernails taste terribly bitter."
Nowadays that kind of behavior could get one locked away, but Leshan wasn't mad. He was conducting a sleep-learning experiment. All the boys had been diagnosed as chronic nail-biters, and Leshan wanted to find out if nocturnal exposure to a negative suggestion about nail biting would cure them of their bad habit.Leshan initially used a phonograph to play the message. It faithfully repeated the phrase 300 times a night as the boys lay sleeping. But five weeks into the experiment, the phonograph broke. Leshan improvised by standing in the darkness and speaking the message himself.At the end of the summer, Leshan examined the boys' nails and concluded that 40% of them had kicked the habit. The sleep-learning effect seemed to be real. However, other researchers later disputed this conclusion. In a 1956 experiment at Santa Monica College, William Emmons and Charles Simon used an electroencephalograph to make sure subjects were fully asleep before playing a message. Under these conditions, the sleep-learning effect disappeared.

#15: The Electrification of Human Corpses

In 1780 the Italian anatomy professor Luigi Galvani discovered that a spark of electricity could cause the limbs of a dead frog to twitch. Soon men of science throughout Europe were repeating his experiment, but it didn't take them long to bore of frogs and turn their attention to more interesting animals. What would happen, they wondered, if you electrified a human corpse?
Galvani's nephew, Giovanni Aldini, embarked on a tour of Europe in which he offered audiences the chance to see this stomach-turning spectacle. His most celebrated demonstration occurred on January 17, 1803 when he applied the poles of a 120-volt battery to the body of the executed murderer George Forster.When Aldini placed wires on the mouth and ear, the jaw muscles quivered and the murderer's features twisted in a rictus of pain. The left eye opened as if to gaze upon his torturer. For the grand finale Aldini hooked one wire to the ear and plunged the other up the rectum. Forster's corpse broke into a hideous dance. The London Times wrote, "It appeared to the uninformed part of the bystanders as if the wretched man was on the eve of being restored to life."Other researchers tried electrifying bodies, with the specific hope of restoring them to life, but with no success. Early nineteenth-century experiments of this kind are considered to have been one of Mary Shelley's main sources of inspiration when she wrote her novel Frankenstein in 1816.

#16: Seeing Through Cat’s Eyes

In 1999 researchers led by Dr. Yang Dan, an assistant professor of neurobiology at the University of California, Berkeley, anesthetized a cat with sodium pentothal, chemically paralyzed it with Norcuron, and secured it tightly in a surgical frame. They then glued metal posts to the whites of its eyes, and forced it to look a screen that showed scene after scene of swaying trees and turtleneck-wearing men.
This was not a form of Clockword-Orange-style aversion therapy for cats. Instead, it was a remarkable attempt to tap into another creature's brain and see directly through its eyes. The researchers had inserted fiber electrodes into the vision-processing center of the cat's brain. The electrodes measured the electrical activity of the brain cells and transmitted this information to a nearby computer which decoded the information and transformed it into a visual image. As the cat watched the images of the trees and the turtleneck-wearing guy, the same images emerged (slightly blurrier) on the computer screen across the room.The commercial potential of the technology is mind-boggling. Forget helmet-cam at the superbowl; get ready for eye-cam. Or how about this — never carry a camera again. Take pictures by blinking your eyes. It would work great unless you had a few too many drinks on vacation.


#17: Stimuli Eliciting Sexual Behavior in Turkeys

Male turkeys aren't fussy. Give them a lifelike model of a female turkey and they'll happily try to mate with it as eagerly as they would with the real thing.
This observation intrigued Martin Schein and Edgar Hale of the University of Pennsylvania, and made them curious about what might be the minimal stimulus required to excite a turkey. They embarked on a series of experiments to find out. This involved removing parts from the turkey model one by one, until the male turkey eventually lost interest.Tail, feet, and wings were all removed, but still the clueless bird waddled up to the model, let out an amorous gobble, and tried to do his thing. Finally, the researchers were left with a head on a stick. And surprisingly, the male turkey still showed great interest. In fact, it preferred a head on a stick over a headless body.Schein and Hale subsequently investigated how minimal they could make the head itself before it failed to elicit a response. They discovered that freshly severed female heads impaled on sticks worked best, but if the male turkey had nothing else it would settle for a plain balsa wood head. Turkeys evidently adhere to the philosophy that if you can't be with the one you love, then love the one you're with.Curious about the mating habits of other poultry, Schein and Hale performed similar tests on White Leghorn Cocks. For those curious, they published their results in an article that boasts one of the most evocative titles in all of science: "Effects of morphological variations of chicken models on sexual responses of cocks."

#18: “Would You Go To Bed With Me Tonight?”

If you were a man walking across the campus of Florida State University in 1978, an attractive young woman might have approached you and said these exact words: "I have been noticing you around campus. I find you to be attractive. Would you go to bed with me tonight?"
If you were that man, you probably would have thought that you had just gotten incredibly lucky. But not really. You were actually an unwitting subject in an experiment designed by the psychologist Russell Clark.Clark had persuaded the students of his social psychology class to help him find out which gender, in a real-life situation, would be more receptive to a sexual offer from a stranger. The only way to find out, he figured, was to actually get out there and see what would happen. So young men and women from his class fanned out across campus and began propositioning strangers.The results weren't very surprising. Seventy-five percent of guys were happy to oblige an attractive female stranger (and those who said no typically offered an excuse such as, "I'm married"). But not a single woman accepted the identical offer of an attractive male. In fact, most of them demanded the guy leave her alone.At first the psychological community dismissed Clark's experiment as a trivial stunt, but gradually his experiment gained first acceptance, and then praise for how dramatically it revealed the differing sexual attitudes of men and women. Today it's considered a classic. But why men and women display such different attitudes remains as hotly debated as ever.

#19: Shock the Puppy

When Stanley Milgram published the results of his obedience experiment in 1963, it sent shockwaves through the scientific community. Other researchers found it hard to believe that people could be so easily manipulated, and they searched for any mistakes Milgram might have made. Charles Sheridan and Richard King theorized that perhaps Milgram's subjects had merely played along with the experiment because they realized the victim was faking his cries of pain. To test this possibility, Sheridan and King decided to repeat Milgram's experiment, introducing one significant difference. Instead of using an actor, they would use an actual victim who would really get shocked. Obviously they couldn't use a human for this purpose, so they used the next best thing — a cute, fluffy puppy.
Sheridan and King told their subjects — volunteers from an undergraduate psychology course — that the puppy was being trained to distinguish between a flickering and a steady light. It had to stand either to the right or the left depending on the cue from the light. If the animal failed to stand in the correct place, the subjects had to press a switch to shock it. As in the Milgram experiment, the shock level increased 15 volts for every wrong answer. But unlike the Milgram experiment, the puppy really was getting zapped.As the voltage increased, the puppy first barked, then jumped up and down, and finally started howling with pain. The volunteers were horrified. They paced back and forth, hyperventilated, and gestured with their hands to show the puppy where to stand. Many openly wept. Yet the majority of them, twenty out of twenty-six, kept pushing the shock button right up to the maximum voltage.Intriguingly, the six students who refused to go on were all men. All thirteen women who participated in the experiment obeyed right up until the end.


#20: Heartbeat At Death

On October 31, 1938, John Deering took a last drag on his cigarette, sat down in a chair, and allowed a prison guard to place a black hood over his head and pin a target to his chest. Next the guard attached electronic sensors to Deering's wrists.

Deering had volunteered to participate in an experiment, the first of its kind, to have his heartbeat recorded as he was shot through the chest by a firing squad. The prison physician, Dr. Stephen Besley, figured that since Deering was being executed anyway, science might as well benefit from the event. Perhaps some valuable information about the effect of fear on the heart could be learned.The electrocardiogram immediately disclosed that, despite Deering's calm exterior, his heart was beating like a jackhammer at 120 beats per minute. The sheriff gave the order to fire, and Deering's heartbeat raced up to 180 beats per minute. Then four bullets ripped into his chest, knocking him back in his chair. One bullet bore directly into the right side of his heart. For four seconds his heart spasmed. A moment later it spasmed again. Then the rhythm gradually declined until, 15.4 seconds after the first shot, Deering's heart stopped.The next day Dr. Besley offered the press a eulogy of sorts for Deering: "He put on a good front. The electrocardiograph film shows his bold demeanor hid the actual emotions pounding within him. He was scared to death."