Sci has a confession to make. I don’t own a TV. Well, rather, I do. It only works to hook a DVD player up to it. Being completely addicted to the internet as I am, I don’t miss it. I also never really watched TV as a kid. In a way, I miss out on a lot of pop culture this way (I must be the only person in the world who doesn’t have to spend the entire day debating “Lost” on Thursdays), but I don’t mind. Who knows? Perhaps if Scimom and Scidad had let little Sci watch tons of TV as a kid, she wouldn’t be the happy little geek she is today. I’m happy as I am, and so TV is something I don’t need.
But there is one thing I’ve never seen, yet only heard of. This elusive thing, this “soap opera” was a legend to me when I was little. When I was home sick from school, I would hunt through the TV for them, occasionally catching glimpses, but never have the patience or the stomach for a full episode. Mostly, they seemed to involve incredibly rich looking people posing tragically over something improbable, like suddenly finding out you are your equally rich mistress’ long lost identical twin. But apparently, it also involves a lot of people stuck in comas, usually to make a spontaneous recovery (probably with amnesia or thinking you’re someone’s long lost identical twin). And a few researchers decided to study this.
Casarett et al. “What’s in a name? Epidemiology and prognosis of coma in daytime television dramas” British Medical Journal, 2005.
Ah, where would Sci be without the glories of the British Medical Journal and Medical Hypotheses. Truly, there would be no weird science without these two glorious repositories of the odd. And this episode of Weird Science comes to you courtesy of Instant Egghead Guide to the Mind, where I found the original citation of this paper. Thanks, Eggheads.
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