11 Most Pointless Scientific Studies Ever

1. Measuring The Brain Activity Of A Dead Salmon

No, that isn't the name of the new Fall Out Boy album.

In a study with the snappily title of Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon: An argument for multiple comparisons correction, scientists put a dead salmon in an MRI machine and measured its brainwaves as it completed a series of tasks.

To be entirely fair, this study wasn't really to ascertain what dead salmon think about, but to highlight how easy it is to get false positives in experiments of this kind.

In their write up, the researchers describe their test subject thusly:

Subject. One mature Atlantic Salmon (Salmo salar) participated in the fMRI study. The salmon was approximately 18 inches long, weighed 3.8 lbs, and was not alive at the time of scanning.

Task. The task administered to the salmon involved completing an open-ended mentalizing task. The salmon was shown a series of photographs depicting human individuals in social situations with a specified emotional valence. The salmon was asked to determine what emotion the individual in the photo must have been experiencing.

Despite the absurdity of the experiment, they were actually able to measure some brain activity in the dead salmon. This doesn't mean that we're dealing with some kind of emotionally intelligent zombie salmon, but shows that external interference can skew the results of fMRI readings, resulting in a false result. It also shows that scientists can be sarcastic gits when they want to be.