5. Harlow’s Monkey Madness
via.psychlopedia.wikispaces.com
Monkeys are better than humans. A monkey can swing naked with a banana in his hand, a cheeky grin on his face and still look cool; you try that in Starbucks and you’re suddenly “creating a scene”. The only people in the world who would ever think that abusing monkeys is a good thing are scientists, who make the little fellas smoke cigarettes before lopping their skulls off to see the effects on their brains. However, one particular scientist decided to take simian cruelty to new levels of nope.
Psychologist Harry Harlow was determined to test the effects of clinical depression upon macaques monkeys, so he took youngsters that had just begun the bonding process with their mothers and put them into dark isolation pits by themselves. The infants were left in the dark cages for up to ten weeks completely alone, while some test chimps had a substitute mother made up for them out of blankets and buttons. The chimps with the dummy mummies clung desperately to them while the majority of the others developed deep clinical depression and became psychotic, to the point that they had become untreatable.
The synopsis of the experiment would seem to be that it is unhealthy to separate infants from their mothers. Quite why Harlow had to psychologically scar baby monkeys to arrive at this conclusion is probably beyond everybody but he.
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