This is Improbable Too Read online

  Grunstein, Ronald R., and Dev Banerjee (2007). ‘The Case of “Judge Nodd” and Other Sleeping Judges: Media, Society, and Judicial Sleepiness’. Sleep 30 (5): 625–32.

  King, Nancy J. (1996). ‘Juror Deliquency in Criminal Trials in America, 1796–1996’. Michigan Law Review 94 (8): 2673–751.

  May we recommend

  ‘Daydreaming, Thought Blocking and Strudels in the Taskless, Resting Human Brain’s Magnetic Fields’

  by Arnold J. Mandell, Karen A. Selz, John Aven, Tom Holroyd and Richard Coppola (paper presented at the International Conference on Applications in Nonlinear Dynamics, 2010)

  The dangers of Seinfeld

  A medical study called ‘Recurrent Laughter-induced Syncope’ documents the existence of a paradoxical malady. Prior to reading the report, physicians might assume the phenomenon to be nothing more than a joke. A joke, they will learn, is just the beginning of the problem.

  The two authors, Drs Athanasios Gaitatzis and Axel Petzold, describe their case in simple, albeit technical, prose: ‘A healthy 42-year-old male patient presented to the neurology clinic with a long history of faints triggered by spontaneous laughter, especially after funny jokes … There was no evidence to suggest cardiogenic causes, epilepsy, or cataplexy and a diagnosis of laughing syncope was made.’ Gaitatzis is based at the SEIN-Epilepsy Institute in Heemstede, the Netherlands, and Petzold, at the UCL Institute of Neurology in London.

  Sadly, the doctors withhold information that would specifically identify the jokes. ‘The first episode occurred 17 years earlier while laughing’, they say. ‘A year later, a particularly funny joke triggered spontaneous heavy laughter followed by another brief episode of loss of consciousness.’ But they do not tell the joke. Nor do they allude to its subject, structure or resolution.

  They do offer something that’s distantly akin to a punchline: ‘He has suffered similar episodes ever since, where he would pass out after spontaneous, unrestrained, heavy laughter.’

  They reveal only spare, peripheral information about the man’s recurrent episodes of loss of consciousness. His swoons had been witnessed, and described, by bystanders. He would lose consciousness for just a few seconds. There were no characteristic body movements except, say the doctors, ‘some mild, non-sustained twitching of his limbs seen in the last attack that lasted 15 seconds’.

  The medical treatise resonates, perhaps unintentionally, with an early Monty Python sketch about a joke so funny that it was lethal (‘No one could read it, and live’).

  Gaitatzis and Petzold searched through medical archives and discovered accounts of some fifteen non-fictional cases. The earliest appeared in a 1997 issue of the journal Catheterization and Cardiovascular Diagnosis, under the headline ‘ “Seinfeld Syncope”.’

  Drs Stephen Cox, Andrew Eisenhauer and Kinan Hreib at the Lahey Hitchcock Medical Center, Burlington, Massachusetts, treated a sixty-two-year-old man who had fainted on at least three occasions, each while ‘watching the television show Seinfeld, specifically, the antics of the George Costanza character played by Jason Alexander. While laughing hysterically, the patient suffered sudden syncope with spontaneous recovery of consciousness within a minute. During one event, he fell face first into his evening meal and was rescued by his wife. The patient and his family were adamant that syncope has not resulted from any other television sitcoms or other stimuli.’

  Drs Cox, Eisenhauer and Hreib conclude with happy news. Seinfeld syncope, they say, ‘is curable by percutaneous stenting’.

  Gaitatzis, Athanasios, and Axel Petzold (2012). ‘Recurrent Laughter-induced Syncope’. The Neurologist 18 (4): 214–5.

  Cox, Stephen V., Andrew C. Eisenhauer and Kinan Hreib (1997). ‘ “Seinfeld Syncope”’. Catheterization and Cardiovascular Diagnosis 42 (2): 242.

  Unhappy? You should ask

  Are the Russians as unhappy as they say they are? Ruut Veenhoven was so worried about that question that he wrote a study about it. Veerhoven did not skedaddle about the shrubbery; he titled his study ‘Are the Russians as Unhappy as They Say They Are?’

  Happiness is something of an obsession for Veenhoven. Based at Erasmus University Rotterdam, he is the editor of the Journal of Happiness Studies, where the ‘unhappy Russians’ study was published.

  In poking at the Russian psyche, Veenhoven limited himself to considering just the Russians who were living in Russia during the 1990s. He evaluated neither the Russians of earlier eras nor the perhaps apocryphal moaning Russians abroad, who enjoy their unhappiness expatriotically. In his report, Veenhoven acknowledges all those masses of historical and wandering Russians with the simple statement: ‘The Russians have a firm reputation for being an unhappy people.’

  Why did Professor Veerhoven undertake this research? Because, he says, he was skeptical about certain things he had been reading: ‘Since the 1980s, several polls in Russia have included questions about happiness. The responses to these questions were quite similar. Average happiness was low in comparison to other nations and declined over time.’

  Veerhoven saw a problem. ‘There are doubts’, he writes, ‘about the validity of these self-reports.’ He challenged himself to either verify or dismiss those doubts. After amassing and examining evidence, he reached a conclusion: ‘It appears that the Russians are as unhappy as they say they are, and that they have good reasons to be so.’

  ‌Not very to quite happy

  Veenhoven built on bits and pieces of research by, among others, a professor with the delightful name ‘Zapf’. Veenhoven did his writing during the year 2000, and got it into print the following year.

  At about that same time, the American scholar Patricia Herlihy looked back at Russia’s happy-and-unhappy national relationship with potent liquor. Herlihy titled her study ‘“Joy of the Rus”: Rites and Rituals of Russian Drinking’. ‘Joy of the Rus’, she explains, is a phrase from the tenth century, credited to Prince Vladmir of Kiev in praise of booze. The joy from ‘joy’ would, in the coming thousand years, be part of a moody, mixed cocktail of emotions:

  By the late nineteenth century … drinking in Russian society had become something other than an unmitigated joy … popular medicine developed aversion techniques to free the drunkard from his thirst for ‘the devil’s blood’. The goal was to concoct a drink so disgusting that the drunkard would react against it or be unable to stomach it. It may be that the temperance advocates, to whom we owe some of these recipes, made them especially nauseating, so as to convince readers to stay sober! The drunkard seeking to break his addiction gulped down his vodka with eels, mice, fish, the sweat of a white horse, the placenta of a black pig, vomit, snakes and worms, grease, maggots, urine, water used to wash corpses, and other disgusting things.

  Vodka, especially, survived these efforts at bastardization, and in the twentieth century became the dominant alcoholic element in the Russian internal struggle over happiness.

  Questions linger. Will the Russians ever find happiness? If so, is it possible that some day they will become too happy? A study by David A.F. Haaga and his colleagues, which perhaps inevitably appeared in the Journal of Happiness Studies, seems to anticipate this concern. The researchers, at the American University in Washington, DC, called their paper ‘Are the Very Happy Too Happy?’.

  In it, they nod to a study by investigators Ed Diener of the University of Illinois and Martin E.P. Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania, who concluded, rather flatly, that ‘being very happy does not seem to be a malfunction.’ But on the basic question of the very happy being too happy, Haaga and his fellows have not themselves taken a permanent stand. ‘Future studies’, they insist, ‘should address this possibility.’

  Veenhoven, Ruut (2001). ‘Are the Russians as Unhappy as They Say They Are?’. Journal of Happiness Studies 2 (2): 111–36.

  Herlihy, Patricia (1991). ‘ “Joy of the Rus”: Rites and Rituals of Russian Drinking’. Russian Review 50 (2): 131–47.

  Friedman, Elisha Tarlow, Robert M. Schwartz and David A
.F. Haaga (2002). ‘Are the Very Happy Too Happy?’. Journal of Happiness Studies 3(4): 355–72.

  Diener, Ed, and Martin E.P. Seligman (2002). ‘Very Happy People’. Psychological Science 13 (1): 81–4.

  The inhumanity of Prozac

  Some have concluded that the drug fluoxetine – commonly known as Prozac – ‘makes people more human’. If that conclusion is true, we can probably learn something very, very interesting from the long series of experiments in which Prozac has been shared with other members of the animal kingdom. Here are a few of the reports that document this happy scientific adventure.

  Bears pacing on Prozac. ‘Use of Fluoxetine for the Treatment of Stereotypical Pacing Behavior in a Captive Polar Bear’ by E.M. Poulsen, V. Honeyman, P.A. Valentine and G.C. Teskey (published in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, 1996)

  Voles socializing on Prozac. ‘Effects of the Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor Fluoxetine on Social Behaviors in Male and Female Prairie Voles (Microtus ochrogaster)’ by C. Villalba, P.A. Boyle, E.J. Caliguri and G.J. DeVries (published in Hormones and Behavior, 1997)

  Pigeons tumbling on Prozac. ‘Serotonergic Involvement in the Backward Tumbling Response of the Parlor Tumbler Pigeon’ by G.N. Smith, J. Hingtgen and W. DeMyer (published in Brain Research, 1987)

  Goats ventilating on Prozac. ‘Effects of Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibition on Ventilatory Control in Goats’ by D.R. Henderson, D.M. Konkle and G.S. Mitchell (published in Respiration Physiology, 1999)

  Turkeys being turkeys on Prozac. ‘Serotonergic Stimulation of Prolactin Release in the Young Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo)’ by S.C. Fehrer, J.L. Silsby and M.E. El Halawani (published in General and Comparative Endocrinology, 1983)

  Dogs dominating on Prozac. ‘Use of Fluoxetine to Treat Dominance Aggression in Dogs’ by N.H. Dodman, R. Donnelly, L. Shuster, F. Mertens, W. Rand and K. Miczek (published in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, 1996)

  Cats spraying on Prozac. ‘Effects of a Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor on Urine Spraying Behavior in Cats’ by P.A. Pryor, B.L. Hart, K.D. Cliff and M.J. Bain (published in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, 2001)

  Mice phagocytosing on Prozac. ‘Effects of Fluoxetine on the Activity of Phagocytosis in Stressed Mice’ by M. Freire-Garabal, M.J. Núñez, P. Riveiro, J. Balboa, P. López, B.G. Zamarano, E. Rodrigo and M. Rey-Méndez (published in Life Sciences, 2002)

  Lobsters retreating on Prozac. ‘Serotonin and Aggressive Motivation in Crustaceans: Altering the Decision to Retreat’ by R. Huber, K. Smith, A. Delago, K. Isaksson and E.A. Kravitz (published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 1997)

  Lizards changing on Prozac. ‘Behavioral Changes in Anolis carolinensis Following Injection with Fluoxetine’ by A.W. Deckel (published in Behavioural Brain Research, 1996)

  Croakers maturing on Prozac. ‘Stimulatory Effects of Serotonin on Maturational Gonadotropin Release in the Atlantic Croaker, Micropogonias undulatus’ by I.A. Khan and P. Thomas (published in General and Comparative Endocrinology, 1992)

  Worms moving on Prozac. ‘The Effects of Cholinergic and Serotoninergic Drugs on Motility in Vitro of Haplometra cylindracea (Trematoda: Digenea)’ by D.M. McKay, D.W. Halton, J.M. Allen and I. Fairweather (published in Parasitology, 1989)

  The most celebrated case may be that of Peter Fong, of Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, who gave Prozac to clams. This caused two things to happen. First, the clams began reproducing furiously – at about ten times their normal rate. And second, Professor Fong was awarded the 1998 Ig Nobel Prize in biology, honouring him, his Prozac and his reproducibly happy shellfish.

  Fong, Peter F., Peter T. Huminski and Lynette M. D’urso (1998). ‘Induction and Potentiation of Parturition in Fingernail Clams (Sphaerium striatinum) by Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors (SSRIs)’. Journal of Experimental Zoology 280 (3): 260–4.

  Defending pay phones and parking spots

  As pay telephones disappear from our cities, with them vanish opportunities to watch an entertaining, maddening form of behaviour. The behaviour was documented in a study called ‘Waiting for a Phone: Intrusion on Callers Leads to Territorial Defense’. The report came out in 1989, before mobile phones nudged public pay phones towards oblivion.

  Professor R. Barry Ruback, with some of his students at Georgia State University, performed an experiment. They began by asking people what they would do if, while talking on a public pay telephone, they noticed someone else waiting to use that phone. Most people said they would hurry up and terminate their call.

  The researchers put that common belief to the test. They lurked discreetly near public telephone booths in the Atlanta area. Seeing someone engaged in a call on a pay phone, they would send a trained stooge to hover expectantly. The stooge ‘simply stood behind the caller, sometimes looking at his watch and putting his hands in his pockets’. Sometimes they sent two stooges. Every stooge was ‘instructed not to stare at the subject’.

  In the absence of stooges, people’s phone calls lasted on average about 80 seconds. When a single stooge stood nearby, people stayed on the phone longer – typically about 110 seconds. And when two stooges queued up, clearly waiting, waiting, waiting for access to the telephone, people kept using that phone much longer – averaging almost four minutes.

  After varying the experiment in small ways, trying to tease out exactly what was or wasn’t happening, the researchers decided they had seen a clear cause and effect – that ‘people stayed longer at the phone after an intrusion, primarily because someone was waiting to use the phone’.

  Even in the absence of pay phones, one can, while strolling through town, see bursts of this kind of ‘territorial defense’. They happen in the street and in parking lots, wherever motorists vie for parking spaces.

  Professor Ruback went behaviour-hunting in a shopping mall car park near Atlanta. In 1997, he and a colleague, Daniel Juieng, produced a report with a title that hints at more violence than the paper delivers: ‘Territorial Defense in Parking Lots: Retaliation Against Waiting Drivers’. When the researchers saw someone get into a car, preparing to drive away, they measured the time until the car actually departed. They saw that, consistently, drivers took longer to leave if someone else was obviously waiting for their space.

  Ruback and his minions forced the issue, sending their own drivers, in various cars, all with particular instructions. They learned that if their ‘intruding’ driver honked a horn, the departing driver would take an especially long time to leave. They also learned that men typically would leave more quickly if they saw that the person waiting to take their place drove a blatantly more expensive vehicle. Women, though, usually were not cowed by such things.

  Ruback, R. Barry, Karen D. Pape and Philip Doriot (1989). ‘Waiting for a Phone: Intrusion on Callers Leads to Territorial Defense’. Social Psychology Quarterly 52 (3): 232–41.

  Ruback, R. Barry, and Daniel Juieng (1997). ‘Territorial Defense in Parking Lots: Retaliation Against Waiting Drivers’. Journal of Applied Social Psychology 27 (9): 821–34.

  Red: bull

  Bulls care little about the redness of a matador’s cape. Psychologists have been pretty sure about that since 1923, when George M. Stratton of the University of California published a study called ‘The Color Red, and the Anger of Cattle’.

  ‘It is probable’, Stratton opined, ‘that this popular belief arises from the fact that cattle, and particularly bulls, have attacked persons displaying red, when the cause of the attack lay in the behavior of the person, in his strangeness, or in other factors apart from the color itself. The human knowledge that red is the color of blood, and that blood is, or seemingly should be, exciting, doubtless has added its own support to this fallacy.’

  Professor Stratton, aided by a Miss Morrison and a Mr Blodgett, conducted an experiment on several small herds of cattle – forty head altogether, a mixture of bulls and bullocks (bullocks are castrated bulls) and
cows and calves, including some who were accustomed to wandering the range and others who lived in barns.

  The researchers obtained white, black, red and green strips of cloth, each measuring two by six feet. These they attached ‘endwise to a line stretched high enough to let the animals go easily under it; from this line the colors hung their 6 feet of length free of the ground, well-separated, and ready to flutter in the breeze.’

  The cattle showed indifference to the banners, except sometimes when a breeze made the cloth flutter. Males and females reacted the same way, as did ‘tame’ and ‘wild’ animals. Red did nothing for them.

  Farmers seem to have already suspected this. Stratton surveyed some. He reports that ‘Of 66 such persons who have favored me with their careful replies, I find that 38 believe that red never excites cattle to anger; 15 believe that red usually does not excite them to anger, although exceptionally it may; 8 believe that it usually so excites, though exceptionally it may not; and 3 believe that it always so excites.’

  One of those three dissenters described her views, well, colourfully: ‘A lively little Jersey cow whom I had known all her six years of life, chased me through a barbed wire fence when I was wearing a red dress and sweater, and never did so before or after. I changed to a dull gray, and reentered the corral, and she paid no attention to me, and let me feed and water her as usual. Also a Durham bull whom I had raised from a calf, and was a perfect family pet, chased me till I fell from sight through some brush when I was wearing the same outfit of crimson.’