This is Improbable Too Page 6
More typical, though, was the farmer who told Stratton: ‘In referring to the saying, “Like waving a red rag before a bull, I have found that to wave anything before a bull is dangerous business.” ’
Stratton, George M. (1923). ‘The Color Red, and the Anger of Cattle’. Psychological Review 30 (4): 321–5.
In brief
‘An Eiffel Penetrating Head Injury’
by M. George and J. Round (published in Archives of Disease in Childhood, 2006)
The authors, at St George’s Hospital Medical School in London, report that: ‘A 3 year old boy presented to our accident and emergency department with an obvious penetrating head injury. He had tripped and fallen onto a metal model of the Eiffel Tower which then became rigidly lodged into his skull.’
X-ray of a three-year-old boy’s head with souvenir Eiffel Tower
Insulting in French
Prior to 2008 no one knew, at all precisely, the pain people suffer when they gaze at an ugly painting – relative to what they’d feel if they were looking at a pretty picture – while a stranger shoots them in the back of the hand with a powerful laser beam. Now something is known about the subject. The knowledge is preserved in a study called ‘Aesthetic Value of Paintings Affects Pain Thresholds’.
The study’s authors, Marina de Tommaso, Michele Sardaro and Paolo Livrea at the University of Bari, Italy, had twelve people each identify paintings as beautiful or ugly, then stare at some of each kind while a laser heated into the dorsal surface of their hand. Each volunteer, after each viewing, rated the pain on a scale of 0 to 100. The hurt was a little worse when they looked at ugly art, they said, mostly.
This manner of inflicting pain – applying a carefully aimed column of light amplified by stimulated emission of radiation (that’s the phrase, more or less, that gives us the cool, five-letter word ‘laser’), is not the only possible way. In analysing how people respond to pain, researchers have dabbled or experimented with different methods of causing that pain. Harold Hillman, of the University of Surrey, published a paper in 1993 called ‘The Possible Pain Experienced During Execution by Different Methods’. His key observation was: ‘It is difficult to know how much pain the person being executed feels, or for how long, because many of the signs of pain are obscured by the procedure.’ In contrast, Richard Stephens of Keele University and his colleagues plunged people’s hands into ice-cold water in their 2009 study ‘Swearing as a Response to Pain’, and again in the 2011 follow-up, ‘Swearing as a Response to Pain – Effect of Daily Swearing Frequency’.
Swearing is risky for researchers. They must beware of the foreign-language discount. Several psychologists have found that swearing in one’s native language dredges up deeper, more hellacious emotion than swearing in a ‘foreign’ language. Among the more subdued descriptions of this quirk, one finds a paper called ‘The Emotional Force of Swearwords and Taboo Words in the Speech of Multilinguals’ by Jean-Marc Dewaele of Birkbeck, University of London. It was published in 2004. Six years later Dewaele produced a study with a more colourful title, one that risks inflicting pain on any journal or newspaper editor who considers permitting a writer to mention it: ‘Christ Fucking Shit Merde’.
The authors of the basic research on people’s reactions to being shot with a laser beam while watching ugly or pretty paintings also continued researching and writing. De Tommaso, Sardaro and Livrea repeated their original experiment, this time on people who were already prone to heady suffering. The result: a 2009 paper called ‘Effects of Affective Pictures on Pain Sensitivity and Cortical Responses Induced by Laser Stimuli in Healthy Subjects and Migraine Patients’.
Tommaso, Marina de, Michele Sardaro and Paolo Livrea (2008). ‘Aesthetic Value of Paintings Affects Pain Thresholds’. Consciousness and Cognition 17 (4): 1152–62.
Hillman, Harold (1993). ‘The Possible Pain Experienced during Execution by Different Methods’. Perception 22 (6): 745–53.
Stephens, Richard, John Atkins and Andrew Kingston (2009). ‘Swearing as a Response to Pain’. Neuroreport 20 (12): 1056–60.
Stephens, Richard, and Claudia Umland (2011). ‘Swearing as a Response to Pain – Effect of Daily Swearing Frequency’. Journal of Pain 12 (12): 1274–81.
Harris, Catherine L., and Jean Berko Gleason (2003). ‘Taboo Words and Reprimands Elicit Greater Autonomic Reactivity in a First Language than in a Second Language’. Applied Psycholinguistics 24 (4): 561–79.
Dewaele, Jean-Marc (2004). ‘The Emotional Force of Swearwords and Taboo Words in the Speech of Multilinguals’. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 25 (2&3): 204–22.
Dewaele, Jean-Marc (2010). ‘Christ Fucking Shit Merde! Language Preferences for Swearing among Maximally Proficient Multilinguals’. Sociolinguistic Studies 4 (3): 595–614.
Tommaso, Marina de, Rita Calabrese, Eleonora Vecchio, Francesco Vito De Vito, Giulio Lancioni and Paolo Livrea (2009). ‘Effects of Affective Pictures on Pain Sensitivity and Cortical Responses Induced by Laser Stimuli in Healthy Subjects and Migraine Patients’. International Journal of Psychophysiology 74 (2): 139–48.
May we recommend
‘Delusions of Halitosis’
by R.L. Goldberg, P.A. Buongiorno and R.I. Henkin (published in Psychosomatics, 1985)
Three
Ears, Tongues, Noses and All That
May we recommend
‘Post-Nasal Drip Syndrome: A Symptom to be Sniffed At?’
by Alyn H. Morice (published in Pulmonary Pharmacology and Therapeutics, 2004)
Some of what’s in this chapter: Old men and their big ears • Look at everything upside-down • A bright thumb in the eye of the paparazzo • The Hapsburg eye, the Coburg nose • Print, lip • Experimental ant gulp • Pet-mounted noise alarm • Music’s eyebrow • Some swallow it hot • Christian smells, holy smells • The afterlife of aristocrats’ body parts • Chalk dust up the nose • Sit, hand; Bite, tongue • Monkey flossing • Cured pork up the nose
All ears research review
Old men have big ears is the consensus of several medical studies on the question. The most celebrated work focused exclusively on men, according with British male doctordom’s smug tradition of showing interest mainly in themselves. But in Japan and in Germany, wide-ranging investigations broke through the patriarchal hegemony. The newer studies made plain, for anyone who cared to know, the long-untold half of the story: old women have big ears too.
The British action played out in a characteristic location: the pages of the British Medical Journal, where any body part is always of interest.
In 1993, Dr James A. Heathcote, a general practitioner in Bromley, ‘set out to answer the question “As you get older do your ears get bigger?” ’ Heathcote and three colleagues examined the ears of 206 men of various ages, then presented his findings in a monograph called ‘Why Do Old Men Have Big Ears?’ They report: ‘A chance observation – that older people have bigger ears – was at first controversial but has been shown to be true.’
Using the pronoun ‘we’ in a manner that excludes half of the population, Dr Heathcote wrote: ‘As we get older our ears get bigger (on average by 0.22 mm a year).’
The biggest oddity, ears aside, comes at the end. Almost in defiance of its title, the paper mutters: ‘Why ears should get bigger when the rest of the body stops growing is not answered by this research.’
Outside Britain, ear-growth data-gatherers took the bother to also look at man’s counterpart: woman.
In Japan, primary care physicians Yasuhiro Asai, Manabu Yoshimura, Naoki Nago and Takashi Yamada measured the ears and height of four hundred adult patients – of both sexes – who visited their clinics. The team’s 1996 report called ‘Correlation of Ear Length with Age in Japan’, also appeared in the sometimes-seemingly ‘we’re-all-ears’ British Medical Journal. The doctors claim two discoveries:
‘Ear length correlates significantly with age, as Heathcote showed, in Japanese people’
‘ear lengt
h corrected for height shows [even] greater correlation with age’
A decade later, Carsten Niemitz, Maike Nibbrig and Vanessa Zacher at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, took a bisexual look at lots of ears. They examined data from a thesis by a scientist named Montacer-Kuhssary, published at the university in 1959. Montacer-Kuhssary’s data were of a rare kind: photographs of 1,448 ears from newborn children, older children and adults up to and including ninety-two-year-olds.
For each ear, the team made fifteen different measurements. They confirmed, they say, that ears never really stop growing throughout a person’s lifetime.
But the big surprise came from comparing women and men: ‘In all parameters where post adult growth was observed, female ears showed a lesser increase than those of men.’ Old men have bigger ears than old women.
Montacer-Kuhssary, by the way, noted back in 1959 that people’s noses, too, usually grow throughout their lifetimes. But in the race toward biggerness, said Montacer-Kuhssary, ears outpace noses.
Heathcote, James A. (1995). ‘Why Do Old Men Have Big Ears?’. British Medical Journal 311 (23 December): 1668.
Asai, Yasuhiro, Manabu Yoshimura, Naoki Nago and Takashi Yamada (1996). ‘Correlation of Ear Length with Age in Japan’. British Medical Journal 312 (2 March): 582.
Niemitz, Carsten, Maike Nibbrig and Vanessa Zacher (2007). ‘Human Ears Grow Throughout the Entire Lifetime According to Complicated and Sexually Dimorphic Patterns: Conclusions from a Cross-sectional Analysis’. Anthopologischer Anzeiger 65 (4): 391-413.
In brief
‘Glue Ear and Grommets’
by D. Isaacs (published in the British Medical Journal, 1992)
An upright Austrian vision
In the middle of the twentieth century, an Austrian professor turned a man’s eyesight exactly upside-down. After a short time, the man took this completely in his stride.
Professor Theodor Erismann, of the University of Innsbruck, devised the experiment, performing it upon his assistant and student, Ivo Kohler. Kohler later wrote about it. The two of them made a documentary film in 1950, ‘The Reversing Glasses and the Upright Vision’. (You can watch it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlHYcN789N4.)
The professor made Kohler wear a pair of hand-engineered goggles. Inside those goggles, specially arranged mirrors flipped the light that would reach Kohler’s eyes, top becoming bottom, and bottom top.
At first, Kohler stumbled wildly when trying to grasp an object held out to him, navigate around a chair or walk down stairs.
In a simple fencing game with sticks, Kohler would raise his stick high when attacked low, and low in response to a high stab.
Holding a teacup out to be filled, he would turn the cup upside down the instant he saw the water apparently pouring upwards. The sight of smoke rising from a match, or a helium balloon bobbing on a string, could trigger an instant change in his sense of which direction was up, and which down.
But over the following week, Kohler found himself adapting, in fits and starts, then more consistently, to such sights.
After ten days, he had grown so accustomed to the invariably upside-down world that, paradoxically and happily, everything seemed to him normal, rightside-up. Kohler could do everyday activities in public perfectly well: walk along a crowded sidewalk, even ride a bicycle. Passers-by on the street did ogle the man, though, because his eyewear looked, from the outside, unfashionable.
Erismann and Kohler did further experiments. So did other scientists. Their impression is that many, perhaps most, maybe just about all, people are able to make these kinds of adjustment. Images reach the eye in some peculiar fashion, and if that peculiar fashion is consistent, a person’s visual system eventually, somehow, adjusts to interpret it – to perceive it, to see it – as being no different from normal. Kohler writes that, ‘after several weeks of wearing goggles that transposed right and left’, one person ‘became so at home in his reversed world that he was able to drive a motorcycle through Innsbruck while wearing the goggles’.
This may strike you as extremely unusual. But the basic ability – to adapt to visions seen topsy-turvy or backwards – is something you have almost certainly witnessed. Many people develop the ability to read documents that are upside down. Many teachers, especially, treasure this as a semi-secret skill they’ve picked up without having worked at it.
This automatic, almost-effortless adaptation to visual weirdness is one of many bizarre things that brains do that scientists simply do not understand. Were we not talking about the brain, it would be appropriate to say that these behaviours, these abilities, are so weird that they are ‘unthinkable’.
Kohler, Ivo (1962). ‘Experiments with Googles’. Scientific American 206: 62–72.
Flashy ways to fight off paparazzi
A new invention aims to foil paparazzi who try to photograph people who do not wish to be photographed. Wilbert Leon Smith Jr and Keelo Lamance Jackson of California obtained a patent in 2012 for what they call ‘Inhibiting Unwanted Photography and Video Recording’. Their invention builds on a simple idea patented in 2005 by Jeremy and Joseph Caulfield from Arizona.
The Caulfields equipped celebs with a flashgun that fires automatically the instant another flashgun fires nearby. Smith and Jackson’s device goes that bit better: it’s a rotating, swivelling, oscillating device that can emit multiple strobe lights and other light beams for as long as the celebrity deems necessary.
The device has uses beyond deterring pesky paparazzi. As Smith and Jackson explain, it can also protect our own spy agencies against nosy foreign bad guys: ‘A surveillance camera detects a covert government operative with access to photographic equipment outside of the government building. Once the covert government operative is detected, the image distortion apparatus subsequently emits a plurality of deterrents in the direction of the photographic equipment to distort images captured therein.’
Inhibitions demonstrated: A celebrity fights off a paparazzo (left) and a soldier shows off a helmet-mounted version of the apparatus (inset)
Paparazzi and spies are but a tiny segment of the population. A decade earlier, Maurizio Pilu, a researcher at Hewlett-Packard in Bristol, took aim at the more general problem. Whenever people set foot in a public place, they can be photographed by strangers who have tiny (or, for that matter, big) cameras. This can happen countless times a day without anyone realizing it. Stroll down a street, and your image may have been captured in images by hundreds of people who were intent on photographing fire hydrants, cats or some civic official who waved at the populace while riding a bicycle.
Pilu’s method could prevent these unwanted captures. Anyone who wants privacy would carry on their person a special signalling device that transmits an electromagnetic message that indicates ‘Do not photograph me’. The scheme requires, perhaps quixotically, that every camera – every camera, owned by anyone – has a special circuitry built into it to receive such signals and alter the camera’s behaviour accordingly.
Pilu no longer works at Hewlett- Packard. But he still keeps an eye on the problem in his new job as lead technologist for digital in the Innovation Programme Directorate at the UK government’s executive innovation agency, the Technology Strategy Board.
Pilu has clocked the arrival of Google Glass – the expensive, not readily available video camera/computer/transmitter/receiver that allows its owner constantly to gather video imagery of whatever happens to be in front of them, wherever they go. On 8 March 2013, in a message sent via Twitter, Pilu (@Maurizio_Pilu) warned the world that Google Glass is just the beginning and that cheaper alternatives to it are coming.
Caufield, Joseph A. (2005). ‘Apparatus and method for preventing a picture from being taken by flash photography’. US patent no. 6,937,163, 30 August.
Jackson, Keelo Lamance, and Leon Smith Wilbert Jr (2012). ‘Inhibiting unwanted photography and video recording’. US patent no. 8,157,396, 17 April.
Pilu, Maurizio (2004). ‘Image capture method, devi
ce and system’. US patent no. 7,653,259, 14 October.
In brief
‘The History of the Evil Eye and Its Influence on Ophthalmology, Medicine and Social Customs’
by George H. Bohigian (published in Documenta Ophthalmologica, 1997)
Features, predictably
Researchers in one field do not always pick up on good suggestions from those outside their specialty. Take, for example, the case of the Hapsburg lip.
‘I do not propose to deal with one of the most famous inherited features, the “Hapsburg Lip” … because it could almost be described as a medical condition, about which I am not qualified to speak. However, I feel sure that the “Hanoverian Eye”, the “Coburg Nose” and the “Danish Neck” will prove equally fascinating.’ So said Frances Dimond, curator of the Royal Photographic Collection, in a lecture that that was published in 1994 in The Genealogists’ Magazine. In the years since, however, the biomedical research community has displayed a collective lack of curiosity about the Hapsburg, Hanoverian and Coburg lip, eye and nose.
Partly this is because certain aspects of these phenomena are well understood. Dimond pointed this out when she said: ‘The true enthusiast for the Coburg nose was, however, the Queen and Prince Albert’s cousin, Prince Augustus of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, who, possessing a fine nose himself, married a French princess, Clementine, who was similarly endowed, with predictable results.’
One has to search the medical literature back to 1988 to find more than a cursory mention of these matters. That was the year that E.M. Thompson and R.M. Winter of the Institute of Child Health in London published their report ‘Another Family With the “Habsburg Jaw” ’. Their report does not stint on detail: ‘We report a three generation family with similar facial characteristics to those of the Royal Habsburgs, including mandibular prognathism, thickened lower lip, prominent, often misshapen nose, flat malar areas, and mildly everted lower eyelids.’