Scientists at the Rochdale Institute for Cerebral Health have released the results of a long running study into dementia and how not reading The Sun is thought to reduce the risk. A claim supported by other findings in the press today.
The study, which has been running for nearly fifty years, involved taking several groups of chimpanzees and feeding them a varied diet of news, literature and print media to track the effects.
Prof Phace Bern, lead researcher in the study, spoke to the Herald about what they believe they have discovered.
“Group A were given a Times cryptic crossword to complete in 1969. They’re still working on it. The clue ‘worshippers receive pleasure from angry god with boobs inside’ is the only one they’ve solved so far.”
Apparently the answer is to fling faeces at the wall.
“The chimpanzees in this study group are exhibiting the usual frustrations experienced by a novice attempting a cryptic crossword and are completely normal, if upset that their retirement age keeps going up.”
Group B was given the collected works of William Shakespeare to read.
Prof Bern revealed,
“They keep staging MacBeth. They seem to really enjoy the bloody politics in the text. This has been useful. The position of alpha chimp keeps changing hands, but only on a makeshift stage they’ve constructed out of wooden tea chests put into their enclosure in the early 1970’s to give them something to do in their rest periods.”
Group C is the group that revealed the disturbing correlation.
“Group C have been on a steady diet of The Sun since 1969. They burn out quickly. We’ve had to replace the study subjects numerous times over. This does raise the risk of invalidating the study, but we’ve ignored that.
They read The Sun for a couple of years and they can’t feed themselves anymore and they seem to react with irrational fury whenever anyone looks into their enclosure.
They also evidence disorientation going to the corner store and don’t seem to remember anything other than that they are now confused. It is alarming.
Although not overly surprising as even today we have heard suggestions that education level and a willingness to learn throughout life can help stave off dementia. And they aren’t likely to learn bugger all reading The Sun their entire adult life. Quite the opposite.
If I wasn’t a scientist I would have been campaigning to close the study down just on the grounds of unnecessary cruelty alone.
The similarity between the symptoms of the study subjects reading The Sun and any of a number of degenerative cognitive diseases is striking.”
It seems the situation hasn’t been alleviated by the removal of the Page Three model either.
“The rage. Most of the chimps in Group C have filled out UKIP membership forms as a result of that. They seem to irrationally blame the EU for not seeing anyone called Chyna Sparkle, 21, Teignmouth, with her hooters out talking about how she would solve the Syrian crisis with reiki.”
However, critics of the study have poured scorn on the findings.
They state that reading The Sun, The Daily Mail and even the scholarly Express is probably a warning sign of the early stage of a degenerative neurological condition, and not actually a causative factor.
