Screaming for Public Welfare

Science thrives on imagination, and imagination knows no boundaries. No wonder, boundaries of sanity may also be breached in the process.

I had conducted a really famous experiment, which had received widespread media coverage:

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Gorillas Pave Way for a Healthy Human Society

Silly-con Valley
9th May, 2009

A team of researchers headed by Ketan Panchal at the Center for Promotion of Mental Derangement (CPMD) located at Silly-con Valley in Madland have found a link between screaming and increased lifespan. This interesting result comes after an intense research of 10 days.

The study design involved capturing a female gorilla in a cage, and prompting her to shriek (the primate version of human screaming) by male onlookers of her own species. This the onlookers accomplished by teasing and taunting her. The consequent unexpected outcome was that she had screamed her lungs out--not in the figurative sense, but anatomically. The forceful expulsion of air from the lungs that accompanied each act of shrieking was found to eject bits of lung tissue out through the mouth. This made the researchers aware of an entity called 'screaming one's lungs out-osis', and also of the veracity of a similar sounding popular saying.

But the greatest positive of the result was increased lifespan found in the onlooker gorillas. It was found after a followup of 20 years that all the 50 onlooker gorillas had lived 2 years more than their expected lifespan, which was found to be significant after statistical analysis. However, the female subject was found to have exhausted at the end of 10-day experiment, and had totally stopped vocalizing anything at all. Her lifespan was found to have shortened by 5 years below that expected for similarly matched female gorillas. But for want of larger sample size, no causal association between screaming and decreased lifespan of the screamer could be established.

These startling results, though found only in primates, have given hopes to and prompted debates between sociologists and economists alike as to what should be the appropriate number of human volunteers per thousand population to prolong the lives of their fellows.

Scientists are hopeful of reproducing the similarly encouraging results also in humans. But their current and greatest impediment is the unavailability of human subjects for screaming as very surprisingly, applications from volunteers for onlooking have far exceeded all expectations

The CPMD welcomes participation from consenting volunteers for screaming, preferably females in their early 20s who may mail their willingness to participate to the following email address. An audio file sample demonstrating their ability to scream will be much appreciated:

panchalkc@yahoo.co.in

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As is the case with any ground-breaking revolutionary scientific finding, even my research finding was met with lot of skepticism, so much so that some mediapersons were *rolling on the floor laughing* just like the male gorillas in the highly confidential pictures below, which I had to release to assail these doubts.

[Click on the above photographs for greater *clarity*] What I have included in the brackets in labels are the scientific proofs for the organisms being what they have been labeled as, and that they are not actually humans posing as Gorillas (not unlike ZooZoos) .

But unlike what most of you deludedly sane people would like to believe, I did receive a few--okay, to be statistically precise, ONE--positive responses for volunteering as a human screamer.

I am publishing the said email response below:

"yes yes yes, I volunteer. Please have me. Please please please :)"

For absolutely arbitrary reasons let us call this respondent "Ms. Human Guinea pig wannabe"

[I assure you, I had not received any response like the one you read above. You *really* think it's possible for someone to respond to such patently silly inhumane experiments?]

And thus went my response:

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Dear Ms. Human Guinea pig wannabe (of course, that's not how I'd addressed her. Remember, this was an *official* communication?),

The CPMD wishes to thank you for your interest in famed experiment--'Health benefits of screaming one's lungs outosis'.

After a thorough scrutiny of your application by our selection committee, we regret to inform that your candidature as a screaming volunteer was deemed as 'ineligible'.

Keeping with the principles of accountability and transparency, the Center cites following reasons for the aforementioned rejection of your application:

1. The tone of your application. Our selection committee apart from experts in other fields, consists of lexico-psychologists, who are adept at gauging the mental health status from a person's choice of words. We are afraid their opinion of your application renders you unsuitable for our study. The motto of our institute is promotion of mental derangement. The excessive amount of enthusiasm as measured by our experts using the latest instruments, implied that there was no margin for further mental derangement in your case. And as you might reckon, including you in the study, thus, would defeat the Center's primary purpose, viz., promoting mental derangement.

2. The pitch of your voice in the audio sample received along with your application. The pitch of human voice consists largely of two components, loudness and frequency. On attempting to play the audio file you had sent, two audio output devices (called speakers in everyday English) were found have developed perforations in their diaphragm. This, our experts in acoustics, fear was because of the frequency of your voice, which exceeded the upper human hearing limit of 20000 hertz, and was audible only to bats. The institute certainly does not align its interests with prolonging the lifespan of bats. The loudness (amplitude) of your voice was found to be 400 decibels. We wish to inform that a 160-decibel sound is sufficient to perforate the tympanic membrane (poke hole in the ear drum). Also, to the utter disbelief of seismologists (those studying earthquakes), your audio sample had managed to create shockwaves which had measured 4.2 on the seismograph. An earthquake of over 5.5 on the Richter scale can lead to large scale destruction.

3. The enthusiastic onlooking volunteers suffered irreversible mental and acoustic trauma. They were rendered incapable of further participation in this study, and in fact their period of stay in the hospital remains indeterminate.

We wish to involve you in our future endeavors for promotion of mental derangement, and will keep you updated on latest developments.

Yours sincerely,

KCP.

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Needless to say, the experiment is still open, and vounteers for screaming are solicited