In the savagely funny British TV sitcom Fawlty Towers, John Cleese (playing Basil Fawlty) famously told his wife that she could win at a game show called Mastermind if she picked as her category “The Bleeding Obvious.” There are times when I suspect that the Bleeding Obvious is also a funding category in medical research.
Recent examples of studies that prove things we thought we already knew include a report in Pediatrics called “What’s in a Smile? Maternal Brain Responses to Infant Facial Cues,” which, as our own editor Kate Rope blogged about, basically confirmed that smiling babies make moms happy.
Here’s another earth-shattering tidbit, from Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research: “Coffee and cigarette consumption are high among AA attendees.” One of the authors asked (in a press release), “Is this behavior simply a way to bond or connect in AA meetings, analogous to the peace pipe among North American Indians, or do constituents of these natural compounds result in pharmacological actions that affect the brain?” To which one might add—vis-à-vis the unfortunate Indian comment—who’s to say peace pipes don’t result in “pharmacological actions that affect the brain?” Grounds for another study!
I’m tossing stones in a glass house, of course: Journalism has no shortage of the Bleeding Obvious. RedEye, a free daily paper connected with the Chicago Tribune, reported on July 23 that local bars stink. Specifically, bars in which smoking is no longer allowed stink of things once hidden by the choking pall of tobacco (Chicago, a bit late to the game, banned smoking in bars as of January 2008). One test rated a local bar three times ranker than a public men’s room and “almost twice as smelly as an animal shelter.” Contributing factors included “a musty/earthy/moldy smell that tends to come from wood, a urine-like scent, a sour/acid/vinegar odor that could come from residual alcohol, and of course the odors of sweat and beer.” Oddly, those are the same things that give dive bars their charm, according to my own research, which I will gladly extend with proper funding.
To be fair, although the RedEye story is unforgivably dumb, Bleeding Obvious medical research does sometimes reveal new facts. The smiling babies research confirmed that “dopaminergic reward-related brain regions are activated specifically in response to happy, but not sad, infant faces,” meaning that moms who don’t respond to their babies aren’t bad moms, they may just be badly wired moms, and perhaps the problem can be helped.
No surprise that the whole Bleeding Obvious category of scientific research is fertile territory for the predatory editors at The Onion. I particularly like these headlines:
• Teen Sex Linked to Drugs and Alcohol, Reports Center for Figuring Out Really Obvious Things
• Study: High Times Not a Gateway Magazine to Harder Readings
• Unemployed Scientists Prove Dog Likes Beer
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