Academics is rife with research that’s bizarre but fun to read

If you are dying to dive-deep into the details of how the 1857 revolt against the East India Company panned out in Devi Patan Mandal, help is at hand. In 2008, a researcher at the Dr Rammanohar Lohia Avadh University, Faizabad, did a PhD on the subject titled “1857 Ke Vidhroh Me Devi Patan Mandal Ka Yogdan”.

No doubt the issue is of historical significance and full marks to the student and the guide for wading into such an esoteric topic.

But the world of research is also littered with studies where the real question at the end is who wants to know? Two recent reports highlight the importance and sometimes the irrelevance of such research. One study study, by a team of researchers at the University of Bath, concluded, to everyone’s utter surprise, that a week off social media reduces depression and anxiety. The other is more generic. For years, research claiming that nature helps mental health has become a cause celebrated in books and magazines. Sadly, it seems such studies were a bit dodgy in their constructs. University of Vermont researchers have found that participants in such studies were overwhelmingly white, and that BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) communities were strongly underrepresented. Ergo, nature helps mental health, but that of largely white and rich people.

Sometimes the research is well-intentioned, though the conclusions leave one gobsmacked. In 2007, researchers at the National University of Quilmes in Buenos Aires carried out a study to prove that Viagra cures hamster jetlag. Nor was the exercise done in jest. Nature magazine reported that the researchers injected hamsters with sildenafil (a class of medications called phosphodiesterase [PDE] inhibitors used to treat erectile dysfunction) and then pushed the animals' light/dark schedule ahead by six hours, roughly the equivalent of putting them on a plane from New York to Paris. Hamsters who'd had a dose of sildenafil adjusted their busy wheel-running schedules to the new light regime 50 percent faster. Sure, the effort might have been to see if the same would work with human beings as well. But jetsetting hamsters and humans don’t appear to have too much in common.