Today I saw a very interesting story on Slashdot: “Study shows monkeys enjoy watching TV”. According to the article, some Japanese scientists measured the activity of a monkey’s brain, and the brainwaves in the “emotional” are of the brain lighted up when the monkey was watching movies of circus animals.

Cool, huh? Monkeys also like to watch other monkeys and stuff on TV.

Well, too bad that the study doesn’t actually say anything like that. I decided to hunt the article to read more details about the methodology used. The news articled linked from Slashdot mentions the Journal name, but not the authors name, or the name of the article! But I managed to find it on the Journal’s webpage, and since it was Open Access, I managed to even take a look at it myself :-). (By the way, I found it funny that the name of the reviewers were also listed in the article, is this common in the biosciences?)

Well, the article, while probably interesting to neuroscientists, doesn’t actually say anything about whether monkeys like TV or not. It seems that its main focus is to test a new instrument to measure brainwaves, and it lists the results obtained when using the device on a monkey tied to a chair in a dark room, being showed a video from time to time. The article itself says that the results exclude any period where the monkey was not looking at the video (apparently, it was 60% of the trials). If anything, what I can conclude from reading the article is that a monkey tied to a chair in a dark room is 60% more likely NOT to watch a video of animals being showed to him.

So much for Animal Planet :-P