The Idea That There Is A Legendary LSD No-No…Only In America. And The Worst Of The Worst Christmas Ads.
(Thanks, Vinny, via Twitter)
Oh, and yesterday someone suggested I blog about how bad the Christmas ads are this year. No need when Charlie Brooker’s about.
This is his worst of the lot.
By the way, I did social psychology at university.
One day I was in a lecture about some kind of psychological thing or other and the lecturer started telling us about animals and facial recognition. The gist of his talk was that most animals don’t really recognise themselves when they look in the mirror.
The exceptions (as far as I recall) are higher primates, such as chimpanzees. They can recognise themselves when they look normal, so to see how far this ability went, the experimenters tried adding clothes to make the chimps look a little bit different. The lecturer explained that one chimp was given a big pink hat to wear and when he looked in the mirror, he failed to recognise himself.
So the guy behind me puts up his hand.
‘Yes?’ says the lecturer.
‘Are you sure he didn’t recognise himself?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well maybe he just looked at himself in the mirror wearing a big pink hat and said, ‘It’s not really me, is it?”