Full of fellow feeling despite being dead
SALMON appear to be able to recognise people’s emotions, according to our first take on research by Craig M. Bennett and colleagues. They showed a fish a series of photographs of humans in “social situations with a specified emotional valence” while peeking into its brain with an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scanner. This revealed, they say, “active voxel clusters in the salmon’s brain cavity and spinal column”.
A clue to the researchers’ motivation is provided by the title of their paper in the lovely Journal of Serendipitous and Unexpected Results (jsur.org/v1n1p1):…
