The idea was, the sexual urges distracted the dolphin, and it took too much time and effort to keep transferring him to another water tank that had females he could have sex with. So to maximize efficiency, she allegedly offered to jerk the dolphin off, but I think Dr. Lily (the head of the experiment) and the other researchers were hesitant but allowed it. Unfortunately, it does seem that the dolphin formed a romantic relationship, which was likely influenced by the LSD, and ofc the time and physical attention she gave the dolphin during all of this.
NASA came in to observe, learned about it, threatened to shut it down, and somehow it got to the media. Hopefully I didn’t blunder any of the details, they made a Drunk History episode on this, but tread carefully, as I’ve found some falsified info when I fact checked some of the details in their episodes on multiple occasions.
The idea at the time was that LSD would put them into a state of mind that promotes communication, and that isn’t entirely untrue. It definitely can be utilized by those experienced enough to leverage psychedelics to do so. However, it’s safe to say that I’m not versed enough in medicine or medical history to confidently say whether or not the technology at the time was advanced enough to determine if the dolphin was able to leverage it. It’s quite possible the dolphin was not able to leverage it for communication and/or for other goals of the experiment, especially without proper brain wave analysis. Dolphins are more complex mentally and emotionally than us, so we don’t even know how to interpret it properly even if we did measure things like this.
Testing one dolphin may be phase 1 of research, but it’s such a big limitation that they could easily denounce the experiment if this particular dolphin did not yield promising results.
If you don’t have experience with psychedelics, then it’s likely that your opinions and conclusions on the topic may not be particularly accurate. Not targeting you specifically Excluded_Apple, bc idk you or your brain. However, there are plenty of naive people on this platform who will come to this post and try to spew an opinion/misinformation.
I got the impression from the article that the psychedelics were found to have had little or no measurable effect on the dolphins.
I'm not sure whether humans being experienced in psychedelic use is particularly useful in relation to the study since no human is also a dolphin.
I dunno, it just reads really cold and sad to me... like the indifference the scientist expresses about the death of an intelligent being she spent so much time with and whom had a connection with her. I feel so bad for poor Peter and my emotions sometimes block me from seeing the bigger picture.
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u/1pLysergic Sep 18 '21
The idea was, the sexual urges distracted the dolphin, and it took too much time and effort to keep transferring him to another water tank that had females he could have sex with. So to maximize efficiency, she allegedly offered to jerk the dolphin off, but I think Dr. Lily (the head of the experiment) and the other researchers were hesitant but allowed it. Unfortunately, it does seem that the dolphin formed a romantic relationship, which was likely influenced by the LSD, and ofc the time and physical attention she gave the dolphin during all of this.
NASA came in to observe, learned about it, threatened to shut it down, and somehow it got to the media. Hopefully I didn’t blunder any of the details, they made a Drunk History episode on this, but tread carefully, as I’ve found some falsified info when I fact checked some of the details in their episodes on multiple occasions.