This is Improbable Page 2

  Auerbach is himself writing a book. It’s about imperial boredom. He will need to expand considerably upon his current study, which is twenty-three pages long and includes only seventy-six footnotes. As this book – the one you are reading – goes to press, Auerbach’s book has not yet hit the market. His website lists it as Imperial Boredom: The Banality of the British Empire, 1757–1939 (in progress).

  Perhaps, though, Auerbach has already done his finest work. Here, in just forty-seven words, is his take on imperial boredom: ‘The reality simply could not live up to the expectations created by newspapers, novels, travel books, and propaganda. As a consequence, notwithstanding some famous exceptions, nineteenth-century colonial officials were deflated by the dreariness of their imperial lives, desperate to ignore or escape the empire they had built.’

  Auerbach, Jeffrey (2005). ‘Imperial Boredom.’ Common Knowledge 11 (2): 283–305.

  28 Straight Hours of Vexations

  German and Austrian researchers analysed what happened to pianist Armin Fuchs when he spent more than a full day playing over and over again, nonstop, an oddly named piece of music by a French composer. They also analysed what happened to the music. This was a tour de force of artistic and neurological repetition.

  The research team – Christine Kohlmetz, Reinhard Kopiez, and Marc Bangert of the Hanover University of Music and Drama, and Werner Goebl and Eckart Altenmüller of the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, in Vienna – published a pair of monographs in 2003 describing what they measured in the pianist.

  The study titles, like the performance, are lengthy. One, in the journal Psychology of Music, includes the phrase ‘Electrocortical Activity in a Pianist Playing “Vexations” by Erik Satie Continuously for 28 Hours’. When Satie composed the piece in 1893, he added an instruction that the performer should: ‘play this motif 840 times in succession’.

  Twenty-first-century researchers Kohlmetz, Kopiez, Bangert, Goebl, and Altenmüller explicitly question whether nineteenth-century composer Satie ‘was aware of the effect his work might have on a pianist, especially with regard to his or her consciousness and motor function’.

  Do the maths and you’ll see that Fuchs, the intrepid piano player, averaged thirty performances per hour. That’s a lot of ‘Vexations’, in two-minute-long chunks.

  Detail from table: ‘Event protocol of the performance recorded by an observer and retrospectively by the pianist’

  By affixing wires to Fuchs’s head and using an electroencephalograph (EEG) to continuously monitor gross electrical activity in his brain, the researchers discovered that ‘the pianist experienced different states of consciousness throughout the performance ranging from alertness to trance and drowsiness’.

  Fuchs’s playing grew inconsistent during the periods of drowsiness. But when alert, the man was a model of consistency. ‘Most importantly’, says the study, ‘whilst in deep trance, which included effects such as time-shortening, altered perception and characteristic changes in the EEG, the pianist managed not only to keep on playing but also to maintain a constant tempo, hence executing complex motor schemes at a high level of performance.’ (For a video of the performance in progress, visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=km9GiejF5OQ.)

  The second study, published in the Journal of New Music Research, gives a much finer-grained ‘tempo and loudness analysis’. It boasts that ‘non-linear methods revealed that changes in loudness and tempo are of a highly complex nature, and both parameters unfold in an 18-dimensional space. This has never before been demonstrated in performance research.’

  ‘Vexations’ is not one of Erik Satie’s most beloved compositions, not yet anyway. Although brief (when played, contrary to instructions, just a single time), it meanders along in a way that’s neither quick nor catchy.

  But Satie pioneered something of value – the technique (‘play this motif 840 times’) that the music business would refine many years later, with significant payoff. Radio disc jockeys demonstrated in the 1950s that, by persistently, diligently repeating a song, they could ensconce it into the minds of many listeners, who would ever after believe it to be one of their favourite tunes.

  Kohlmetz, Christine, Reinhard Kopiez, and Eckart Altenmüller (2003). ‘Stability of Motor Programs during a State of Meditation: Electrocortical Activity in a Pianist Playing “Vexations” by Erik Satie Continuously for 28 Hours.’ Psychology of Music 31 (2): 173–86.

  Kopiez, Reinhard, Marc Bangert, Werner Goebl, and Eckart Altenmüller (2003). ‘Tempo and Loudness Analysis of a Continuous 28-Hour Performance of Erik Satie’s Composition “Vexations”.’ Journal of New Music Research 32 (3): 243–58.

  The Mind of the Waiter

  Buenos Aires boasts impressive waiters, whose minds are worth studying, according to the paper ‘Strategies of Buenos Aires Waiters to Enhance Memory Capacity in a Real-Life Setting’, published in the journal Behavioural Neurology. ‘Typical Buenos Aires senior waiters memorize all the orders from respective clients and take the orders without written support of as many as ten persons per table’, it explains. ‘They also deliver the order to each and every one of the customers who ordered it without asking or checking.’

  And most of the time, they get it right.

  How do they manage it? Researchers Tristan Bekinschtein, Julian Cardozo, and Facundo Manes ran an experiment to find out. The three are based variously at the Institute of Cognitive Neurology and at Favaloro University, both in Buenos Aires, and at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit of the University of Cambridge.

  Eight customers sat around a table and ordered drinks. When the waiter returned with the beverages, the scientists tallied up how many were served to the people who had ordered them, and how many were mistakenly delivered to someone else. All the waiters performed admirably.

  The customers later ordered more drinks, then switched seats before the waiter returned. This produced dreary results. The scientists tried this on nine waiters, only one of whom consistently delivered drinks to the right people.

  Interviewed afterwards, the waiters explained that they generally paid attention to customers’ locations, faces, and clothing. They also disclosed a tiny trick of the trade. They ‘did not pay attention to any customer after taking a table’s order, as if they were protecting the memory formation in the path from the table to the bartender or kitchen’.

  In preparing their study, Bekinschtein, Cardozo, and Manes discovered a published account of a most remarkable waiter (they do not specify, though, whether he was Argentinian). This man had trained himself to almost Olympian awesomeness in the delivery of food. He ‘could recall as many as 20 dinner orders, categorize the food (meat or starch) and link it to the location in the table. He also used acronyms and words to encode salad dressing and visualized cooking temperature for each customer’s meat and linked it to the position on the table.’

  The Buenos Aires waiters, in contrast, ‘reported systematically that they have not thought of any particular strategy and that their great ability comes only with time and practice’. True or not, this answer accords with their profession’s famed tradition of haughty disdain for theory.

  The best waiter – the one who delivered drinks correctly even when customers had swapped seats – claimed that, unlike his colleagues, he ignored where customers sat, and paid attention only to their looks. His professional experience, he said, ‘had been mostly in cocktail parties for 10 years, where people tend to change their position in the room; only in the last three years he had been working in the restaurant’.

  Bekinschtein, Tristan A., Julian Cardozo, and Facundo F. Manes. ‘Strategies of Buenos Aires Waiters to Enhance Memory Capacity in a Real-Life Setting.’ Behavioural Neurology 20: 65–70.

  Gambling with Brain Damage

  Brain damage can sometimes give gamblers a winning edge, an American study suggests. The researchers take a flier at explaining how and why certain brain lesions might, in some circumstances, help a person triumph over oth
ers or over adversity.

  The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, renders its tantalizing, juicy question into lofty academese. The five co-authors, led by Baba Shiv, a marketing professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, ask ‘Can dysfunction in neural systems subserving emotion lead, under certain circumstances, to more advantageous decisions?’

  The team experimented with people who had abnormalities in particular brain regions – the amygdala, the orbitofrontal cortex, and the right insular or somatosensory cortex. Medically, abnormalities in these areas can signal that something is amiss in how the person handles emotions.

  Each brain-damaged person got a wad of play money, and instructions to gamble on twenty rounds of coin tossing (heads-you-win/tails-you-lose, with some added twists). Other people, who had no such brain lesions, got the same amount of money, and the same gambling instructions.

  The brain-damaged gamblers pretty consistently ended up with more money than their healthier-brained competitors. The researchers speculate that when ‘normal’ gamblers encounter a run of unhappy coin-toss results, they get discouraged and become cautious – perhaps too cautious. Not so the people with brain-lesion-induced emotional dysfunction. Encountering a run of bad luck, they plunge on, undaunted. And then enjoy a relatively handsome payoff. At least sometimes.

  The study notes that this brain damage side-benefit might occasionally even save someone’s life. They cite the case of a man with ventromedial prefrontal damage who was driving under hazardous road conditions: ‘When other drivers reached an icy patch, they hit their brakes in panic, causing their vehicles to skid out of control, but the patient crossed the icy patch unperturbed, gently pulling away from a tailspin and driving ahead safely. The patient remembered the fact that not hitting the brakes was the appropriate behavior, and his lack of fear allowed him to perform optimally.’

  Lead author Baba Shiv has an eye for nonstandard ways of exploring the weird morass that is human behaviour. He sometimes teaches a course called ‘The Frinky Science of the Mind’. And in 2008, he and three colleagues were awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for demonstrating that expensive fake medicine is more effective than cheap fake medicine.

  Shiv, Baba, George Loewenstein, Antoine Bechara, Hanna Damasio, and Antonio R. Damasio (2005). ‘Investment Behavior and the Negative Side of Emotion.’ Psychological Science 16 (6): 435–39.

  Heels Give Rise to Schizophrenia

  Do shoes cause schizophrenia? Jarl Flensmark of Malmo, Sweden, wants to know, and in a recent paper in the journal Medical Hypotheses, he explains why.

  ‘Heeled footwear’, he writes, ‘began to be used more than 1000 years ago, and led to the occurrence of the first cases of schizophrenia.... Industrialization of shoe production increased schizophrenia prevalence. Mechanization of the production started in Massachusetts, spread from there to England and Germany, and then to the rest of Western Europe. A remarkable increase in schizophrenia prevalence followed the same pattern.’

  The story, if accurate and true, is disturbing. Flensmark sketches the details.

  ‘The oldest depiction of a heeled shoe comes from Mesopotamia, and in this part of the world we also find the first institutions making provisions for mental disorders,’ he writes. ‘In the beginning schizophrenia appears to be more common in the upper classes. Possible early victims were King Richard II and Henry VI of England, his grandfather Charles VI of France, his mother Jeanne de Bourbon, and his uncle Louis II de Bourbon, Erik XIV of Sweden, Juana of Castile [and] her grandmother Isabella of Portugal.’ All of these individuals are either known or suspected of wearing heeled shoes.

  He cites evidence from other parts of the world, too – Turkey, Taiwan, the Balkans, Ireland, Italy, Ghana, Greenland, the Caribbean, and elsewhere.

  ‘Probably the upper classes began using heeled footwear earlier than the lower classes,’ Flensmark points out. He then cites studies from India and elsewhere, which seem to confirm that ‘schizophrenia first affects the upper classes’.

  From these two streams of evidence – the rise of heels and the increase in documented cases of what may have been schizophrenia, Flensmark divines a strong connection. He modestly implies that he is not the first to do so. In the year 1740, he writes, ‘the Danish-French anatomist Jakob Winslow warned against the wearing of heeled shoes, expecting it to be the cause of certain infirmities which appear not to have any relation to it’.

  Flensmark boils the matter into a damning statement: ‘After heeled shoes is [sic] introduced into a population the first cases of schizophrenia appear and then the increase in prevalence of schizophrenia follows the increase in use of heeled shoes with some delay.’

  ‘I have,’ he continues, ‘not been able to find any contradictory data.’

  Lest critics dismiss this as mere hand-waving or foot-tapping, Flensmark explains, biomedically, how the one probably causes the other: ‘During walking synchronised stimuli from mechanoreceptors in the lower extremities increase activity in cerebellothalamo-cortico-cerebellar loops through their action on NMDA-receptors. Using heeled shoes leads to weaker stimulation of the loops. Reduced cortical activity changes dopaminergic which involves the basal gangliathalamo-cortical-nigro-basal ganglia loops.’

  One could conclude that the medical establishment enjoys Flensmark’s discovery. Virtually no one has stepped up to dispute it.

  Flensmark, Jarl (2004). ‘Is There an Association Between the Use of Heeled Footwear and Schizophrenia?’ Medical Hypotheses 63 (4): 740–47.

  Pretty, Clever

  Are beautiful people more intelligent than the rest of us? Satoshi Kanazawa and Jody Kovar think so. In their seventeen-page study ‘Why Beautiful People Are More Intelligent’, they explain bluntly: ‘Individuals perceive physically attractive others to be more intelligent than physically unattractive others. While most researchers dismiss this perception as a “bias” or “stereotype”, we contend that individuals have this perception because beautiful people indeed are more intelligent.’

  Kanazawa, a reader in management and research methodology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, has become a brainy specialist on beauty: he entitled a subsequent study ‘Beautiful Parents Have More Daughters’. Kovar is affiliated with Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

  The pair of them apply detective skills and high intellect to some common beliefs: ‘Critics have noted that people have the opposite stereotype that extremely attractive women are unintelligent. We do not believe such a stereotype exists, however. We instead believe that the stereotype is that blonde women and women with large breasts are unintelligent, both of which, just like the stereotype that beautiful people are intelligent, may statistically be true.’

  Kanazawa and Kovar don’t merely say these things. They back them up. The volume of their evidence, if not the evidence itself, is overwhelming. Nearly all of it comes from studies – lots of them – done by other people. Among the earlier discoveries:

  QUOTE: Middle-class girls ... have higher IQs and are physically more attractive than working-class girls.

  QUOTE: More beautiful children and adults of both sexes have greater intelligence (and thus) the maxim ‘beauty is skin deep’ is a ‘myth’.

  QUOTE: Physical attractiveness has a significant positive effect on family income, personal income and education.

  Yet, for all this, there is still hope for the physically bland. Kanazawa and Kovar explain there’s a good possibility that any particular individual is not a dope: ‘Our contention that beautiful people are more intelligent is purely scientific (logical and empirical); it is not a prescription for how to treat or judge others.... At the same time, our theory is probabilistic, not deterministic, and the available evidence suggests that the empirical correlation between physical attractiveness and intelligence ... is modest at best. Thus, any attempt to infer people’s intelligence and competence from their physical appearance, in lieu of a standardized IQ test, would be highly inefficient
.’

  At the very end of their report, the two scientists suggest that beautiful people are more than just clever. The chain of logic, and its ultimate conclusions, are provocative:

  Aggressive men are the most likely to achieve high status and to mate with beautiful babes;

  Aggressive men are the most likely to have aggressive children, and beautiful babes are the most likely to have beautiful babies.

  Add these together, Kanazawa and Kovar say, and you must conclude that, compared to everyone else, ‘beautiful people are more aggressive’.

  Kanazawa, Satoshi, and Jody L. Kovar (2004). ‘Why Beautiful People Are More Intelligent.’ Intelligence 32: 227–43.

  Kanazawa, Satoshi (2007). ‘Beautiful Parents Have More Daughters: A Further Implication of the Generalized Trivers-Willard Hypothesis (gTWH).’ Journal of Theoretical Biology 244 (1): 133–40.

  Brain on Head in Brain

  Russell Brain – who was also Lord Brain, Baron Brain of Eynsham – was editor of the journal Brain. In 2011, the journal Brain celebrated the golden jubilee of the publication of Dr Brain’s essay ‘Henry Head: A Man and His Ideas’. Head preceded Brain (the man) as head (which is to say, editor) of the journal (the name of which, I note again for clarity, is: Brain).

  Head headed Brain from 1905 until 1923. Brain became head in 1954, dying in office in 1967. No other editors in the journal’s long history (it was founded in 1879) could or did boast surnames that so stunningly announced their obsession, profession, and place of employ. One of Dr Brain’s final articles, in 1963, is called ‘Some Reflections on Brain and Mind’.

  Dr Head wrote many monographs, some quite lengthy, for Brain. The first, a 135-page behemoth, appeared in 1893, long before he became editor. In it, Dr Head gives special thanks to a Dr Buzzard, citing Dr Buzzard’s generosity, the nature of which is not specified.