• tburkhol@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    Fun fact: in the boiling frog experiment, the frogs were ‘pithed.’ Jam a stick in their skull and scramble their brain.

    Frog spinal cords have a lot of reflexes. They’ll use one leg to wipe a painful stimulus off the other. They’ll jump. But they accommodate pretty quickly and won’t get excited enough to jump out of slowly warming water. Gotta have a brain for that.

    Recounted here: https://archive.org/details/studiesfrombiol00martgoog/page/398/mode/2up

    Original ref: Goltz, F. 1869. Beiträge zur Lehre von den Functionen der Nervencentren des Frosches. Berlin, 1869, p. 127, etc Which is actually online: https://ia801200.us.archive.org/15/items/b22344937/b22344937.pdf

    • CommanderCloon
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      3 days ago

      Oh wow

      the brainless frog, if allowed to rest in water the temperature of which is gradually raised, behaves wholly unlike the normal frog under the same circumstance

      Damn I’m really happy they cleared that up! 1800s people were really something else

    • umbrella
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      3 days ago

      arent we ‘pithed’ too? distractions and brainwashing galore to turn us away from ourselves and the problems around us…