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.
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
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
Oh wow
Damn I’m really happy they cleared that up! 1800s people were really something else
arent we ‘pithed’ too? distractions and brainwashing galore to turn us away from ourselves and the problems around us…