This is Improbable Page 4

  ‘An Experiment in Dream Telepathy with “The Grateful Dead”’

  by Stan Krippner, Monte Ullman, and Bob Van de Castle (published in the Journal of the American Society of Psychosomatic Dentistry and Medicine, 1973)

  Neurological Damage from Praying

  He who prays fervently courts danger – neurological danger.

  This stark fact has only recently been reported to the public, in a study published by five neurologists at Christian-Albrechts-University in Kiel. But fear not – the risk for any particular individual is low. In the recorded history of the world, the physicians try to assure us, this is probably the very first case.

  Perhaps to avoid inciting jitters among the devout, perhaps due to worries about inter-cultural tensions, or perhaps merely through professional tradition, the doctors couch their tale in dry, medico-lingo-laced language: ‘We report on an unusual presentation of a task-specific focal oromandibular dystonia in a 47-year-old man of Turkish descent. His speech was affected exclusively while reciting Islamic prayers in Arabic language, which he otherwise did not speak.’

  The problem – involuntary jaw-muscle twitching – had been cropping up for two years. It occurred only when the man recited the Arabic prayers he had been praying since childhood, never at other times. It happened whether he said the prayers loud and fast, or just muttered them slowly. It would cease right after he finished praying. It never happened when he spoke in German or in Turkish. An extensive battery of tests showed him to be otherwise in good neurological, muscular, and dental health.

  The doctors came up with a simple, fairly effective fix: they had the man touch himself lightly on the jaw. Usually, this would interrupt the spooky jaw gyrations.

  This general kind of problem is called ‘focal dystonia’. It’s the involuntary fluttering of muscles that one ordinarily controls masterfully. It arises, somewhat mysteriously, in a few extraordinarily unlucky people who perform ‘a highly stereotyped and frequently repeated motor task’. It’s what happens in writer’s cramp, and in the eyelid twitching known as blepharospasm, and very occasionally in certain specialized professions. Doctors have seen it in pianists, tailors, and assembly-line workers. But never before in someone whose repetitive action consisted only of saying prayers.

  The doctors, Tihomir Ilic, Monika Pötter, Iris Holler, Günther Deuschl, and Jens Volkmann, appear to have been surprised – and possibly a bit delighted. They bestowed upon this condition the name ‘praying-induced oromandibular dystonia’.

  And digging through medical histories, they did find one earlier case that seems truly analogous. It was recorded in England in the early 1990s. The doctors (N. J. Scolding of London and four colleagues) involved in the case later published an account. ‘A 33-year-old right-handed agricultural auctioneer first noticed involuntary deviation of his jaw to the right developing while auctioneering’, they wrote. ‘Further attempts to conduct auctions met with an inevitable recurrence of his symptoms, usually after 2 to 3 minutes of speaking, and eventually it was necessary for him to move to a clerical job.’

  Those doctors, like their later German counterparts, suffered the involuntary fluttering of heart and mind that is triggered by the beckoning finger of fame. They concocted a new piece of medical jargon. Thus did the term ‘auctioneer’s jaw’ enter medical literature.

  Ilic, Tihomir V., Monika Pötter, Iris Holler, Günther Deuschl, and Jens Volkmann (2005). ‘Praying-Induced Oromandibular Dystonia.’ Movement Disorders 20 (3): 385–86.

  Scolding, N. J., S. M. Smith, S. Sturman, G. B. Brookes, and A. J. Lees (1995). ‘Auctioneer’s Jaw: A Case of Occupational Oromandibular Hemidystonia.’ Movement Disorders 10 (4): 508v9.

  ‌Two

  ‌‌Things that Matter

  An Improbable Innovation

  ‘Circular Transportation Facilitation Device’

  a/k/a ‘the wheel’ by John Keogh (Australian Innovation Patent no. 2001100012, granted and honoured, jointly with the patent office, with the 2001 Ig Nobel Prize in technology)

  Some of what’s in this chapter: Breaching, by means of a shoe • Making horrid, chilling sounds • Skipping and hopping • Plumbing the masticatory mechanism, aurally • Glug-glugging • OmmmmmmmmOMmmmmmOMmm • Self-encrustation with bees and music • Foreseeing football on Mars • Basic black, in the desert • Walking with washing machines • A strapless dress, forcefully

  The Great Untied-Shoelace Experiment

  Details about the late Norbert Elias’s international untied-shoelace experiments were difficult to track down. But Ingo Mörth found them.

  Mörth, a professor at the Johannes Kepler Universität in Linz, Austria, broke the news in an article called ‘The Shoe-lace Breaching Experiment’, published in the June 2007 issue of Figurations: Newsletter of the Norbert Elias Foundation: ‘Norbert Elias started a series of breaching experiments, beginning ad hoc, and ending in various situations in Spain, France, England, Germany, and Switzerland. He strolled around in all these contexts with intentionally untied and trailing shoe-laces.’

  Elias had an eminent career as a sociologist, beginning in Germany in the 1930s. After retiring as a reader at University of Leicester in 1964, he went a-wandering, doing sociological research as a byproduct of his tourism.

  In the Spanish fishing village of Toremolinos in 1965, giggling girls spurred him to realize that his left shoelaces ‘were untied and trailing’. Mörth describes the magic that resulted: ‘By retying the loose shoe-lace, Elias had the feeling of being included in the village community – at least for a moment, and based on the community aspect of the everyday reality in the village, people took notice and nodded approval of his rectifying something that had a disturbing appearance.’

  Elias thereupon began his experiments, strolling across Europe with deliberately untied shoelaces. In England ‘mostly elderly gentlemen reacted by communicating with me on the danger of stumbling and falling’. In Germany ‘older men only looked at me somewhat contemptuously, whereas women reacted directly and tried to ‘clean up’ the obvious disorder, on the tram as well as elsewhere’.

  The professor and his laces thusly pioneered – though the academic world mostly failed to celebrate him and them for it – what are now known as ‘breaching experiments’. American sociologist Harold Garfinkel coined the term and rose to fame by conducting a series of such activities. As Mörth explains, these experiments ‘breached the taken-for-granted assumptions underlying everyday situations, thereby generating consternation and embarrassment among other people present’.

  Elias’s many fans in the Norbert Elias Foundation and elsewhere were aware that he had done something with shoelaces, but because Elias did not publish a formal academic study, most did not know that they could read a firsthand account of what, where, and when he did it. Thanks to Mörth, scholars can now learn that Elias’s historic report was published in the German weekly magazine Die Zeit in 1967, in the travel section, under the headline ‘Die Geschichte mit den Schuhbändern’ (‘The Story of the Shoe-Laces’).

  In publicizing the existence of Elias’s original account, Mörth flung open a door through which researchers had, for forty years, thought themselves restricted to only a squinting glance.

  Mörth, Ingo (2007). ‘The Shoe-lace Breaching Experiment.’ Figurations: Newsletter of the Norbert Elias Foundation 2 (27): 4–6.

  Elias, Norbert (1967). ‘Die Geschichte mit den Schuhbändern.’ Die Zeit, 17 November.

  An Improbable Innovation

  ‘Garment Device Convertible to One or More Facemasks’

  a/k/a a brassiere that, in an emergency, can be quickly converted into a pair of protective masks, by Elena N. Bodnar, Raphael C. Lee, and Sandra Marijan (US Patent no. 7,255,627, granted 2007 and honoured with the 2009 Ig Nobel Prize in public health)

  From ‘Garment Device Convertible to One or More Facemasks’

  Chilling Sounds

  Fingernails on a blackboard. Why does the very phrase send chills down one’s back? The
question has annoyed scientists for at least 2300 years. Aristotle mentioned the existence of what he called ‘hard sounds’, but didn’t try very hard to explain them.

  In the mid-1980s, three scientists assaulted the problem directly, subjecting volunteers to a battery of electronically synthesized nails-on-blackboard screeching. D. Lynn Halpern, Randolph Blake, and James Hillenbrand at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, published details in the journal Perception and Psychophysics. They called their study ‘Psychoacoustics of a Chilling Sound’.

  First, they ran some tests to establish exactly where nails-on-a-blackboard ranks in the hierarchy of annoying sounds.

  They recruited a panel of volunteers – a different group from the one that would later undergo the intensive, dedicated exposure to the Sound of Sounds. The panel listened to recordings of sixteen different, hypothetically ‘annoying’ sounds. They rated just how annoying each was. This ranged from not very (for chimes, rotating bicycle tyres, and running water) to excruciating. Jingling keys mildly annoyed some people. Then, increasingly less pleasant, came the sounds of a pencil sharpener; a blender motor; a dragged stool; a metal drawer being opened; scraping wood; scraping metal; and rubbing two pieces of Styrofoam together. But the annoyance of fingernails-on-a-blackboard topped them all.

  Halpern, Blake, and Hillenbrand, having established this simple fact, then converted the tape recording to a digital signal, so that they could manipulate and experiment with constituent high and low pitches. The formal report notes the researchers’ belief that the signal was of good quality. ‘To the authors and several other reluctant volunteer listeners’, they write, ‘the digitized, filtered signal sounded very similar to, and just as unpleasant as the original.’

  The original recorded, pre-digitized sound was not actually of scraping fingernails, but of something known, from previous experiments, to be very like it. In a footnote, Halpern, Blake, and Hillenbrand confide that ‘the instruction set used in this study included a description of [a] three-pronged garden tool being dragged across a slate surface. Virtually all subjects shuddered upon reading this portion of the instructions.’

  The shuddering volunteers listened to several different, digitally doctored versions of the sound, and rated the unpleasantness of each.

  The study’s conclusion, when all was scraped and done, is perhaps worth quoting: ‘Our results demonstrate that the unpleasant quality associated with the sound of a solid object scraped across a chalkboard is signaled by acoustic energy in the middle range of frequencies audible to humans. High frequencies, contrary to intuition, are neither necessary nor sufficient to elicit this unpleasant association. Still unanswered, however, is the question of why this and related sounds are so grating to the ear.’

  The story didn’t end there, of course. In 2004, Josh McDermott and Marc Hauser of Harvard University conducted a series of acoustic and psychological experiments. In the process, they discovered a major difference between Harvard students and cotton-top tamarin monkeys. Harvard students actively avoid fingernail-on-blackboard sounds when given the opportunity, but tamarins generally don’t. McDermott and Hauser hazard some guesses about why this is so – they suggest it may be in some way related to our ability to appreciate or deplore music.

  The 2006 Ig Nobel Prize in the field of acoustics was awarded to Halpern, Blake, and Hillenbrand for their chilling research. Still, the mystery endures, giving cold discomfort to almost everyone who hears about it.

  Halpern, D. Lynn, Randolph Blake, and James Hillenbrand (1986). ‘Psychoacoustics of a Chilling Sound.’ Perception and Psychophysics 39: 77–80.

  McDermott, Josh, and Marc Hauser (2004). ‘Are Consonant Intervals Music to Their Ears? Spontaneous Acoustic Preferences in a Nonhuman Primate.’ Cognition 94: B11–B21.

  Hop, Skip, and Reach Conclusions

  When do young adults skip and hop, and why? These are the questions raised by Allen W. Burton, Luis Garcia, and Clersida Garcia. Their answers appear in the research report ‘Skipping and Hopping of Undergraduates: Recollections of When and Why’. Burton, at the University of Minnesota, and Garcia and Garcia, at Northern Illinois University, write that ‘the purpose of this study was to compare the reasons why young adults skip and hop and when they last skipped and hopped’.

  The researchers collected data from 253 female and 411 male university students. Each of those young adults was asked two skipping and two hopping questions:

  Approximately how long ago did you last spontaneously skip?

  Why did you skip? In other words, what elicited your skipping behaviour?

  Approximately how long ago did you last spontaneously hop?

  Why did you hop? In other words, what elicited your hopping behaviour?

  Based on the results of that survey, Burton, Garcia, and Garcia conclude that hopping and skipping are not the same thing. Not to undergraduate students. At least, not as far as when and why are concerned. At least, not completely. Their report explains in detail.

  That’s the story on the when and why of hopping and skipping. Now, how about the how?

  Claire Farley, Reinhard Blickhan, Jacqueline Saito, and Richard Taylor at Harvard University published a massive six-page report on their experiments with ‘hopping frequency in humans’. Two young women and two young men did the hopping, individually, on a treadmill. The treadmill ran, so to speak, at various speeds. Each individual turned out to have a preferred hopping frequency, at which she or he most strongly resembled (in certain respects) a rock glued atop a spring.

  That’s true of hopping on two feet. Hopping on one foot is an entirely different question. Or at least it has the potential to be an entirely different question. That potential was explored in research done by G. P. Austin, G. E. Garrett, and D. Tiberio at Sacred Heart University, in Fairfield, Connecticut. In June 2002 they leaped into public view with a report entitled ‘Effect of Added Mass on Human Unipedal Hopping’. Six months later they popped up again, with ‘Effect of Frequency on Human Unipedal Hopping’. The next year they jumped into sight yet again, with ‘Effect of Added Mass on Human Unipedal Hopping at Three Frequencies’.

  Have they gained a leg up on their professional competitors? How high will their ambitious research programme take them? We shall see.

  Burton, Allen W., Luis Garcia, and Clersida Garcia (1999). ‘Skipping and Hopping of Undergraduates: Recollections of When and Why.’ Perceptual and Motor Skills 88: 401–6.

  Farley, Claire T., Reinhard Blickhan, Jacqueline Saito, and C. Richard Taylor (1991). ‘Hopping Frequency in Humans: A Test of How Springs Set Stride Frequency in Bouncing Gaits.’ Journal of Applied Physiology 71 (6): 2127–32.

  Austin, G. P., G. E. Garrett, and D. Tiberio (2002). ‘Effect of Added Mass on Human Unipedal Hopping.’ Perceptual and Motor Skills 94 (3): 834–40.

  Austin, G. P., D. Tiberio, and G. E. Garrett (2002). ‘Effect of Frequency on Human Unipedal Hopping.’ Perceptual and Motor Skills 95 (3): 733–40.

  Austin, G. P., D. Tiberio, and G. E. Garrett (2003). ‘Effect of Added Mass on Human Unipedal Hopping at Three Frequencies.’ Perceptual and Motor Skills 97 (2): 605–12.

  Sounds Delicious

  Can a machine identify what you’re chewing, merely from the sound? Yes, if you are at a laboratory in Zurich, Switzerland, or Hall-in-Tirol, Austria, and if you are chewing potato crisps, apples, mixed lettuce, cooked pasta, or boiled rice.

  Oliver Amft, Mathias Stäger, and Gerhard Tröster of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and Paul Lukowicz of Austria’s University for the Health Sciences, Medical Informatics and Technology (UMIT), describe their work succinctly: ‘using wearable microphones to detect and classify chewing sounds (called mastication sounds) from the user’s mouth’. But, they explain, this is just stage 1 of their dream. It’s an unusual dream: to build a computer-based machine ‘that precisely and 100% reliably determines the type and amount of all and any food that the user has consumed’.

  Nothing about stage 1 is ea
sy. The scientists list three different approaches that a machine might take in trying to sense someone’s food intake automatically:

  detecting and analysing chewing sounds,

  using electrodes mounted on the base of the neck (e.g., in a collar) to detect and analyse bolus swallowing,

  using motion sensors on hands to detect food intake-related motions.

  Amft, Stäger, Tröster, and Lukowicz chose option (a). It, alone, seemed within the range of the technology available to them today.

  Their report is written for specialists, but contains delights for everyone. My favourite is the graph titled ‘Chewing sound and speech recording in a room with background music’, which depicts the sound intensity during a minute-long span. The graph’s four segments are labelled ‘eating lettuce’, ‘user speaking’, ‘eating pasta’, and ‘music playing’.

  Here are some of the things the scientists say they learned in having their machine analyse a total of 650 ‘chewing sequences’ produced by four healthy chewers:

  Good quality chewing sound signal can be obtained by placing a microphone in the ear canal.

  Chewing sounds can be discriminated from a signal containing a mixture of speech, silence and chewing.

  Listening to a sequence of chewing sounds, it is possible to identify the beginnings of the individual single chews.

  Chewing-sound-based discrimination between very different kinds of food – the kinds mentioned above – is possible with greater than eighty percent accuracy.

  This all builds on decades of work that began with Swedish Institute for Food Preservation Research scientist B. K. Drake’s 1963 study ‘Food Crushing Sounds: An Introductory Study’.