Blinded, Yet Again, By Science

Scientists. They make funny TV shows and clever predictions. What do they do with their spare time? Well, aside from imagining doomsday scenarios and being overly concerned about which seat in the living room one occupies on a consistent basis, they tend to do experiments. Many of these experiments seem geared to diminish our collective joy. Like those undergraduate researchers at Connecticut College.
According to the big brains at Conn College, led by professor Joseph Schroeder, Oreos are as addictive as cocaine. They determined this by placing rats in a maze with Oreo cookies on one side and rice cakes on the other, measuring the amount of time the rats spent on each side. Doctor Schroeder said in his press release, "Just like humans, rats don’t seem to get much pleasure out of eating [rice cakes]." Schroeder conducted a similar experiment, except that instead of tempting the rats with Oreos and rice cakes, he did so with injections of cocaine or morphine on one side, and saline injections on the other. It turns out that the rats spent as much time on the Oreo side of the maze in the Oreo experiments as they did on the drug side of the maze in the drug experiments. Science is telling us that Milk's favorite cookie is a drug.
Thanks, science. I'm not really sure that I need  a bunch of neuroscientists to tell me this. I know precisely how long a bag of Oreos can stay in my house before they are consumed. "Our research supports the theory that high-fat/high-sugar foods stimulate the brain in the same way that drugs do," Schroeder said. "It may explain why some people can't resist these foods despite the fact that they know they are bad for them." He went on to talk more about pleasure centers of the brain, and how Oreos activated more neurons than cocaine or morphine. This could be just me, but I took that last bit as a good thing.
The most intriguing part of the study to me? The part where they determined that rats tend, like so many of us non-rats, to eat the creamy filling first before the cookie. Maybe that just shows what good sense we all share. Now back to that whole global warming/collision course with an asteroid thing.