By Jeffrey Hoodaman
In an upcoming study to be published in Psychological Science, psychologists from the University of Minnesota have discovered that seriously, nobody cares about your stupid camp friends.
“Campers come home with all sorts of stories about cabin secrets, sneak-outs, and hook-ups,” says University of Minnesota psychologist Shira Gabriel. To better understand the human brain’s reaction to ‘camp talk,’ the researchers recruited 140 undergraduates. Each subject spoke for thirty minutes with Becky Leonard, a twelve year old from Deluth, Minessota who believes the summer of 2011 to have been “like, the bestest summer of her whole lyfe!” The undergraduates’ brain activity levels were monitored before, during, and after their conversations with the excited young camper.
The experiment turned out to be much more violent than the researchers had anticipated. An overwhelming majority of the undergraduates shoved pencils and other sharp objects into their ears as Becky Leonard spoke. “Sadly, we weren’t able to get accurate readings on our brain monitoring devices because they were soaked in blood,” Gabriel laments, “but we noted our subjects’ attempts to rupture their own eardrums as strong negative responses to ‘camp talk’.”
The psychogologists’ study quantitatively confirmed what many people have long suspected about going to camp:
1) From the outside looking in you can’t explain it
2) From the inside looking out you can’t explain it
3) If you try to explain it, people will shove pencils in their ears
