RIFLE RANGE BOY

Derren Brown: Netflix special (2018) Push, Sacrifice Darren Brown calls himself a psychological illusionist. He devises elaborate scams with his team of actors, engineers, stuntmen and others to influence his subjects to willingly perform heinous crimes or sometimes unthinkable sacrifices. He does all these with just suggestions as if the subjects are doing it at their own free will.  In an episode named 'Push', four people are shortlisted from a pool of applicants to help out in a charity event. He used the famous test where applicants stand up at the ring of a bell without any rhyme or reason to pick his choice. This is a classical experiment done by psychologists to illustrate that humans are mere unthinking conformists. To cut the long story short, three out of the four candidates that Brown selected could be coaxed to push a man off the edge of the roof at the order of a person in authority. This result is comparable to the Milgram Experiment in 1963 to illustrate o...

Experimenter (2015) Now, how often have we seen seemingly good people doing incomprehensibly evil deeds which are atypical of their general behaviour and predisposition? Too many times, middle management officers had been cruel beyond comprehension just because they were given the authority to do so. Even though, these junior officials know it is wrong to do certain things, they still do it as long as somebody else is taking charge. This phenomenon of blind obedience to authority was a favourite subject of Dr Stanley Milgram, a Jewish psychologist whose relatives perished in Hitler's concentration camps. The question of the Holocaust and the justification for the acts of genocide by those accused at the Nuremberg trial must have been close to his heart. Around the time of Eichmann trial, in 1962, in Yale, Milgram performed an ingenious social experiment (see Youtube clip below) which was later condemned as unethical, for invoking emotional stress is some participants, to ...

Back in medical school, we had the honour of having the first-hand experience of listening to a learned man of stature croak cockamamie. The deputy director of Health then officiated some function. The gist of the speech that left an everlasting impression on me was his stand on allocations of funds for research. From the podcast: Bigger than Bacon, Radiolab. He lamented the idea of students complaining about the lack of grants for research. He insisted that of one is genuinely interested in doing research, he can even do it under the coconut tree! I am sure many findings can be cooked up under the tree - with the help of coconut oil, coconut milk and coconut toddy! Somehow, this thought came to me when I was listening to a podcast recently.  Apparently, the first thing they teach you in underwater surveillance studies is to identify a crackling sound which is not the noise of a advancing naval fleet but a particular type of shrimps. These single clawed crusta...