How dead do ya gotta be?

There two ways of reporting this, and I’m not entirely sure which version I prefer.

It seems that a crack team from University of California Santa Barbara recorded brain activity in a dead salmon. That bit of information would be truly weird and definitely qualifies as something WholeWeirdWorld would glom onto. But that’s not the weird part.

Another way of spinning the story is to report that the results of this serious study, entitled “Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon,” documents the probability of false positives in fMRI testing. That’s not weird, either.

The quirky part comes with wondering which of the UCSB intelligentsia determined that the best way to demonstrate this theory was by using a dead fish. Or…wait…perhaps it’s not a false positive.

SOURCE: Short Sharp Science