This is Improbable

by Marc Abrahams

  ‌Prologue

  ‌‌Without Ducks

  There are no homosexual, necrophiliac ducks in this book.* There wasn’t room. Too many other improbable stories require space here.

  It can be tempting to assume that ‘improbable’ implies more than that – implies bad or good, worthless or valuable, trivial or important. Something improbable can be any of those, or none of them, or all of them, in different ways. Something can be bad in some respects and good in others.

  Improbable is, simply: what you don’t expect.

  I collect stories about improbable things, things that make people laugh, then think. The research, events, people, and pages in this book defy any quick attempt at judgement (bad-or-good? worthless-or-valuable? trivial-or-important?). But don’t let that stop you from trying. See what you make of these:

  Measuring how cats skulk. Mechanically plucking and packaging a hijacker, then ejecting and delivering him by parachute to authorities on the ground below. Making people read inappropriately highlighted textbooks. Determining a person’s natural hopping frequency. Watching volunteers as they listen to fingernails scraping on a blackboard. Monitoring the brain of a pianist as he repeats a short song non-stop for twenty-eight hours. Strolling with one shoelace untied, in country after country. Engineering a bra that can quickly convert into a pair of protective face masks. Placing a cat on a cow, then exploding paper bags every ten seconds. Optimizing the packaging for a large hollow chocolate bunny. Applying the thoughts of the French philosopher Foucault to the lives of Australian Rules football players. Adapting Jesus’s strategic leadership principles for the US Army. Plumbing the psyche of fruit machine gamblers. Classifying the kinds of boredom felt by mid-level administrators in the British Empire. Surgically altering a Belgian so he resembles singer Michael Jackson. Examining porcupine copulation. Discovering that electro-ejaculation is difficult to perform on the rhinoceros.

  Most of what you’ll read here first appeared, in some form, in my weekly ‘Improbable Research’ column in the Guardian. But the plod of science does go on, and so for this book I’ve dug up more details, added updates, and tossed in extra improbable titbits.

  There’s more to each of these stories than I could fit into these pages, of course. That’s partly why I give you citations. Surprises await you, should you choose to follow those leads.

  There’s another, more demanding reason to include the citations. Some people think these stories are fictional or exaggerated. No, friend: these are nonfiction. I have tried hard to exaggerate nothing.

  Sincerely and improbably,

  Editor and Co-founder,

  Annals of Improbable Research

  ‌* Now, about those ducks. If you want to read about them, or find out what’s happened on the several scientific research fronts that grew up in the wake of their discovery, you’ll have to go look on your own. The place to start is Kees Moeliker’s now-historic report ‘The First Case of Homosexual Necrophilia in the Mallard Anas platyrhynchos (Aves: Anatidae)’, published in 2001 in the Dutch biology research journal Deinsea (see volume 8, pages 243–47; no translator needed). Or take the special tour at the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam where Kees, the museum’s curator, one afternoon (a) noticed a sudden loud sound that turned out to be a duck fatally crashing at high speed into the museum’s glass wall, then (b) took up his notebook and camera to document how the event played out over the next seventy-five minutes. Or you could skip ahead to watch videos of the 2004 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony at Harvard University, where Kees was awarded that year’s Ig Nobel in the field of biology. Alternatively, you could read the book De eendenman (the title translates as The Duck Guy), which Kees wrote a few years later, after a publisher nagged him to do it; the book became so popular in the Netherlands that it was reprinted five times during the first two weeks. Or you could read some of the reports Kees subsequently wrote for the Annals of Improbable Research, for which he now serves as European Bureau Chief. His reports cover many topics. Birds that spend their days repeatedly hurling themselves against a particular window. Historic murders of sparrows by cricket players and television producers. International biomedical concern about the possible disappearance of pubic lice. And more.

  Many of the people described in this book are like Kees Moeliker, in at least one way. When they give their attention to a particular question, they can be entertainingly focused about it.

  ‌

  This Is Improbable

  ‌One

  ‌‌Strange in the Head

  In Brief

  ‘My Grandmother’s Personality: A Posthumous Evaluation’

  by Frederick L. Coolidge (published in the Journal of Clinical Geropsychology, 1999)

  Some of what’s in this chapter: Thinking, to the brink of medical danger • Spotting hairy heads in theme parks • Being bored for His Majesty • Playing on, whilst being watched • Being brain damaged, for better wagering • Fingering beauty for intelligence • Heading up Brain • An Alias for body hair • Praying, to the brink of madness.

  Your Mind Could Kill You

  Exactly how dangerous is it to think? The question matters, because for some people it truly is dangerous – physically, life-threateningly dangerous.

  This question also bears on one that’s seemingly unrelated: is it dangerous for students to use a calculator, rather than do maths in their heads?

  In 1991, researchers in Osaka, Japan published a report called ‘Reflex Epilepsy Induced by Calculation Using a “Soroban”, a Japanese Traditional Calculator’. (The English word for soroban is ‘abacus’.) The report describes an unfortunate young man who ‘entered college in 1980, where he belonged to a music club and was in charge of the drums. After six months, he felt intense psychological tension during drum playing and particularly when he had to write musical scores phrase after phrase while listening to the music recorded on tape.’ The situation worsened. Writing musical scores sometimes induced generalized tonic-clonic convulsions. The man truly suffered for his music.

  In his final year at university, he discovered that doing calculations on an abacus caused the same problem, with even more severity. He stopped using an abacus, and started seeing doctors.

  Specialists have seen and reported other such cases.

  Consider the disturbingly thought-provoking paper entitled ‘Seizures Induced by Thinking’. The report was published by A. J. Wilkins and three colleagues at the University of Essex in the Annals of Neurology in 1982. The researchers describe a man who suffered convulsions whenever he performed certain kinds of mental arithmetic. This was pure mental calculation, without the complication of an abacus or other mechanical or electronic apparatus. Mental addition seemed harmless enough for this man, and so did mental subtraction. But whenever he tried doing multiplication in his head, it triggered seizures. Division was equally a danger.

  Other cases on record hint that subtraction is not always as safe as it seems, at least not for absolutely everyone. Nor is addition.

  Mathematics and musical composition are not the only hazardous mental activities. A team at St Thomas’ Hospital in London documented the plight of seventeen people who must watch what they watch. For them, the act of reading can trigger seizures. Newspapers are dangerous. Books are dangerous. Perilous materials are everywhere. There are also people for whom the act of writing is dangerous.

  So, in reading, in writing, in arithmetic, and in other kinds of thought, true dangers lurk. They are exceedingly rare. At least, that’s what the doctors say they think.

  Wilkens, A. J., B. Zifkin, F. Andermann, and E. McGovern (1982). ‘Seizures induced by thinking.’ Annals of Neurology 11: 608–12.

  Yamamoto, Junji, Isao Egawa, Shinobu Yamamoto, and Akira Shimizu (1991
). ‘Reflex Epilepsy Induced by Calculation Using a “Soroban”, a Japanese Traditional Calculator.’ Epilepsia 32: 39–43.

  Koutroumanidis, M., M. J. Koepp, M. P. Richardson, C. Camfield, A. Agathonikou, S. Ried, A. Papadimitriou, G. T. Plant, J. S. Duncan, and C. P. Panayiotopoulos (1998). ‘The Variants of Reading Epilepsy. A Clinical and Video-EEG Study of 17 Patients with Reading-Induced Seizures.’ Brain 121: 1409–27.

  Combing Through the Data

  Clarence Robbins and Marjorie Gene Robbins visited theme parks hoping to find a good, representative mix of hairy-headed strangers. They then wrote ‘Hair Length in Florida Theme Parks: An Approximation of Hair Length in the United States of America’. The study tells how Robbins and Robbins gathered their data, combed through it, and extrapolated the strands to gain a new understanding of America.

  At the time of their investigation, Robbins and Robbins were the leading researchers at Clarence Robbins Technical Consulting, a think tank located in their home in Clermont, Florida. Clermont is just a short drive from four big theme parks – Epcot, Universal Studios, the Magic Kingdom, and MGM Studios. In visiting those parks, the researchers set themselves a simple, clear goal: ‘to obtain data on the percentage of persons in the US with different lengths of scalp hair’.

  The goal was not so easily attained. Robbins and Robbins found it prudent to make two additional theme park visits specifically to address questions pertaining to accuracy.

  The first extra visit was to ‘determine whether or not any hairstyles might interfere with or affect our estimates on free-hanging hair length’. This proved susceptible to an easy statistical adjustment.

  The other visit was to ‘determine whether or not any headcovers’ – by which they meant caps, hats, and scarves – would skew the estimates. They decided, happily, that headcovers cause no such problems.

  Robbins and Robbins could not, of course, ensure that their hairy-headed sample accurately represented the entire American populace. But the monograph tells how they tried: ‘In an attempt to try to determine how this population relates to the general US population, several telephone calls were made to the Walt Disney Corporation, including their Market Research Department. Those contacted refused to provide any helpful information, indicating that their data and results were proprietary.’

  The Robbins–Robbins study, though technical in nature, also presents facts that may be enlightening to laypersons: ‘One woman who was observed at Epcot had hair reaching several centimeters past her buttocks. She was dressed in a skintight costume, as were two young men walking with her shortly after a Disney parade. She had curly blonde hair and appeared to be in her mid to late 20s. This woman was most likely a Disney employee, hired for her long hair, because we observed her once before in a Disney parade playing Rapunzel.’

  The report, published in the Journal of Cosmetic Science, concludes with a compelling summary: ‘By observing the hair of 24,300 adults in central Florida theme parks at specified dates from January through May of 2001 and estimating hair length relative to specific anatomical positions, we conclude that about 13% of the US adult population currently has hair shoulder-length or longer, about 2.4% have hair reaching to the bottom of the shoulder blades or longer, about 0.3% have hair waist-length or longer, and only about 0.017% have hair buttocks-length or longer. Hair appreciably longer than buttock-length was not observed in this population.’

  Robbins, Clarence, and Marjorie Gene Robbins (2003). ‘Scalp Hair Length. I. Hair Length in Florida Theme Parks: An Approximation of Hair Length in the United States of America.’ Journal of Cosmetic Science 54 (1): 53–62.

  Truth on the Side

  On which side lies the truth? It’s on the left, according to a 1993 study published in the journal Neuropsychologia. The left ear, this study says, is better than the right ear at discerning truth. Slightly better. In most people. Some of the time.

  The experiment, called ‘Hemispheric Asymmetry for the Auditory Recognition of True and False Statements’, was conducted by Franco Fabbro and his team at the University of Trieste. Twenty-four men and twenty-four women each donned headphones, and then (presumably) followed these instructions: ‘In the headphones you will hear phrases pronounced by four people you don’t know. There are two types of phrase – “This is a pleasant photo” and “This is an unpleasant photo”. While they pronounced these phrases they were looking at photographs which they had previously judged to be pleasant or unpleasant. Sometimes they are telling the truth. Sometimes they are lying. After hearing a phrase you have to decide whether you think the speakers are telling the truth or a lie.’

  The effect is subtle. According to the data, the left-ear truth detector is not especially good at recognizing women’s lies. It works, to the extent it works, only when a man does the lying. Even then, it correctly recognizes only sixty-three percent of the true statements as being true.

  Fabbro and his colleagues were intrigued by the two cerebral hemispheres. One is thought to be more skilled than the other at handling emotions. ‘Most people undergo an increase in emotional stress when telling a lie’, the study says. The theory, too, is subtle. Fabbro and his colleagues phrase it this way: ‘Since in human cultures lying prevailingly occurs at the verbal level, it is reasonable to expect a stronger tendency to consider false that kind of information which is transmitted and processed through verbal systems. For the same token it is reasonable to expect a stronger tendency to consider true the information which is processed by non-verbal systems.’

  A different experiment, conducted more than a decade earlier at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, looked for something less subtle. And found it.

  Walter W. Surwillo told all in his study called ‘Ear Asymmetry in Telephone-Listening Behavior’, which was published in the journal Cortex. He, too, was curious about the powers of the left ear versus the right. Surwillo surveyed people whose jobs involve a lot of telephoning, and also people whose jobs don’t. His question: which ear do they prefer for listening on a telephone?

  The results: ‘Listening with the left ear was associated with heavy use of the telephone. The most frequently given reason for listening with the left ear was that it freed the right hand for writing and dialing. This preference would appear to be motivated by convenience for although either ear is available for listening, it is easier to hold the receiver to the left than the right ear while grasping it in the left hand.’

  For further elucidation of the relative power of the left and right ears, you may wish to consult a study of 203 telesales staff examining the relationship between ear preference, personality, and job performance ratings. Those who preferred a right ear headset generally rated higher in supervisors’ eyes when it came to actual performance and developmental potential compared to those staff who preferred a left ear headset.

  Fabbro, F. B., B. Gran, and A. Bava (1993). ‘Hemispheric Asymmetry for the Auditory Recognition of True and False Statements.’ Neuropsychologia (31) 8: 865–70.

  Surwillo, Walter W. (1981). ‘Ear Asymmetry in Telephone-Listening Behavior.’ Cortex 17 (4): 625–32.

  Jackson, Chris J., Adrian Furnham, and Tony Miller (2001). ‘Moderating Effect of Ear Preference on Personality in the Prediction of Sales Performance.’ Laterality: Asymmetries of Body, Brain, and Cognition 6 (2): 133–40.

  Imperial Boredom

  True, at its height, the British Empire produced magnificent heaps of wealth and power. But according to historian Jeffrey Auerbach, the empire also generated staggering amounts of boredom.

  In a copiously documented report in the journal Common Knowledge, Auerbach writes: ‘Throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, British imperial administrators at all levels were bored by their experience traveling and working in the service of king or queen and country. Yet in the public mind, the British empire was thrilling – full of novelty, danger, and adventure, as explorers, missionaries, and settlers sailed the globe in search of new lands, potential converts, and untold riches.�
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  Auerbach’s interests are not limited to boredom. An assistant professor of history at California State University, Northridge, he has published on many other subjects, among them ‘The Homogenization of Empire’, ‘The Monotony of Empire’, and the inspirationally titled ‘The Impossibility of Artistic Escape’.

  The imperial boredom report is filled with telltale evidence of administrators’ boredom. Those administrators range from the soon-to-be celebrated Winston Churchill (who at age twenty-one wrote that Indian life was ‘dull and uninteresting’) to the clerk who wrote this ditty:

  From ten to eleven, ate a breakfast at seven;

  From eleven to noon, to begin ‘twas too soon;

  From twelve to one, asked ‘What’s to be done?’

  From one to two, found nothing to do;

  From two to three, began to foresee

  That from three to four would be a damned bore.

  Auerbach complains that, for generations, ‘Scholars have by and large perpetuated [a] glamorous view of the empire, portraying imperial men either as heroic adventurers who charted new lands and carried “the white man’s burden” to the farthest reaches of the planet or as aggressors who imposed culturally bound norms and values on indigenous peoples and their ways of life.’

  He says he did his research by ‘reading against the grain of published memoirs and travel logs’ and by digging into the unspectacular mutterings of private diaries and letters. His task was the more difficult, he argues, because ‘if people felt bored before the mid-eighteenth century, they did not know it’. This view of boredom, he points out, was persuasively developed by Patricia Meyer Spacks, whose 304-page book Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind, titillated thrill-starved scholars in 1995.