Tuesday, December 2, 2008

That esteemed journal, Viz

Viz is a British institution. One of the funniest magazines ever printed, and utterly unique; the most obvious comparison, although it's a bad one, is MAD Magazine, but I've always found Viz much more entertaining.

Just about everything in Viz is a parody - most commonly the taregt is British comic strips, but most issues have parodies of newspapers as well. Although almost everything in the magazine is full of nudity, profanity, or both, Viz features often have a (semi)serious message. There's a long-running series poking fun at religion and pseudoscience; a few months ago there was a strip about "Dr" Gillian McKeith and her Giant Pile of Bollocks, and recently they ran a contest, in association with Ben Goldacre, in which you could win a free PhD - perfect for cranks who need to add a little academic credibility. In fact Ben has said that he aims for his columns to be something of a cross between Viz and the British Medical Journal.

So, inspired by some Viz fun on ScienceBlogs, I thought I'd post a classic bit of parody neuro-journalism from a few years back. Or is it a parody? You'll learn more about the brain reading this than you will from any number of writeups of fMRI studies.

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