11 Most Pointless Scientific Studies Ever
11. Rats Dont Speak Backwards Japanese
Don't all gasp at once, but it turns out that when you play backwards Japanese and Backwards Dutch to a rat, it can't tell the difference.
Unbelievable, right?
To be fair to the scientists behind Effects of Backward Speech and Speaker Variability in Language Discrimination by Rats, they were trying to figure out how human babies learn how to talk using the rhythm of their mother tongue.
Thee researchers taught Japanese and Dutch to rats because of the very difference rhythms of each language and then measured how they responded to it when played both forwards and backwards.
They didn't quite figure out the mechanisms behind it, but surely the real point here is that they somehow managed to teach rats how to speak Japanese and Dutch?