This happens often in science, just as it does in other fields of human endeavour. Some bold pioneer steps into little-known territory, ignorant that his is not the very first visit. The traces of these intellectual expeditions, deposited over many years in layers upon the ground, form a sort of mental compost. It sits, ripening, for future scholars to uncover.
Christenfeld, Nicholas (1995). ‘Choices from Identical Options.’ Psychological Science 6 (1): 50–55.
Yoshimura, H. (1973). ‘Review of Medical Researches at the Japanese Station (Syowa Base) in the Antarctic.’ In O. G. Edholm and E. K. E. Gunderson (eds). Polar Human Biology. London: Heinemann, 54–65.
Oscillating Over This and That
Everyone oscillates, one way and another. We vibrate, we hum, we bounce. We have our ups and downs. Some of this oscillation attracts the attention of researchers named Tainsh.
In 1972, Michael A. Tainsh published a monograph called ‘Oscillation of Human Performance as a Personality Measure’, in the journal Perceptual and Motor Skills. Tainsh was then based at the University of Aston, an institution whose very name oscillates. In its current phase, the name is Aston University.
Tainsh wrote to me about his monograph, saying it was inspired by a forty-five-year-old book: ‘May I suggest that you read the work of Spearman and his seminal work The Abilities of Man, written, if I recall correctly, in 1927. The concept of oscillation is described fully in the chapter of the same name.’
I followed his suggestion. Spearman – Charles H. Spearman, professor of philosophy of mind at the University of London – indeed rolled out the concept of human oscillation. Spearman then issued a rousing call: ‘Finally, there is the great task of determining how this tendency to oscillate correlates with sex, race, social stratum, parentage, and above all with vocational success.’ Tainsh is one of the few who answered that call.
Tainsh explains that his 1972 paper ‘is very brief and difficult to decipher unless you understand the background which was three years of PhD work based in UK and USA ... The purpose of the work was to describe the “fits and starts” of human performance in terms of wave functions as many engineers would find quite normal if they were examining linear systems. This was quite new to psychologists and my PhD was well received.’
A wave function is a mathematical description, a formula, of something that vibrates. Scientists who study physics labour to write wave functions that correspond to certain behaviours of light, or of a subatomic particle, or of other idealized physical entities. Einstein, Schrödinger, and other modern physicists never managed to devise a wave function to describe a person. But maybe they never tried.
In 1975, Tainsh and a colleague published a study, perhaps distantly related to the oscillation work, called ‘The Influence of Travelling on Decision-Making’, in which they ‘concluded that there was a reduction in the travellers’ capacities to make logical decisions following a 100-mile bus journey’. Two years later, Tainsh published a solo study with almost the same title (he removed the word ‘The’ from the beginning). Though less than a page in length, the later report packs in a tremendous amount of information before reaching its final sentence, which reads: ‘Apparently the influence of long distance travelling on logical thinking may be significant but quite small.’
Another, different Tainsh investigated another, different kind of human vibration, in 1988. Susan M. M. Tainsh of the University of Toronto and four colleagues published ‘Noise-Making Amongst the Elderly in Long Term Care’ in The Gerontologist. The journal explains that ‘about 30% of residents presented noise-making behavior’.
The study’s centrepiece is ‘a typology of noise-making’ that identifies, once and maybe for all, the six categories of elderly noise-making. These are: ‘purposeless and perseverative noise-making’; ‘noise-making in response to the environment’; ‘noise-making to elicit a response from the environment’; ‘“chatterbox” noise-making’; ‘noise-making in the context of deafness’; and the exhaustive ‘other noise-making’.
Tainsh, Michael A. (1972). ‘Oscillation of Human Performance as a Personality Measure.’ Perceptual and Motor Skills 35 (2): 677–78.
–– and G. Winzar (1975). ‘The Influence of Travelling on Decision-Making.’ Ergonomics 18 (4): 427–34.
–– (1977). ‘Influence of Travelling on Decision-Making.’ Perceptual and Motor Skills 44 (3): 1106.
Spearman, Charles (1927). The Abilities of Man. London: Macmillan and Co.
Ryan, David Patrick, Susan M. M. Tainsh, Vita Kolodny, Bonnie L. Lendrum, and Rory H. Fisher (1988). ‘Noise-Making Amongst the Elderly in Long Term Care.’ Gerontologist 28 (3): 369–71.
Call for Investigators
The Oscillating Humans Project, announced here, is searching for a living specimen – an exemplar – of an oscillating human.
Definition : For purposes of the project, an Oscillating Human is someone who consistently, repeatedly, over many years, expresses opinions directly opposite to opinions he or she expressed earlier, always ignoring and/or denying the existence of copious, easily found, clear documentation of the earlier opinions.
Purpose : The exemplary person, once identified, will serve as an example for teachers to use in logic classes. To minimize the chance of lawsuits, the exemplar must be a ‘public person’, for whom (as stated above) there is copious, easily found, clear documentation of years and years of oscillation.
If you know of an outstanding specimen, please provide:
The name and a twenty-word biographical sketch of the person.
Several Internet URLs pointing to clear, unarguable documentation.
Send to [email protected] with the subject line:
OSCILLATING HUMANS PROJECT
Chewing on Knowledge
When guests come to dinner, a question may arise: ‘Do people chew delicious food faster than they chew distasteful food?’ The answer seems to be yes, according to an experiment performed by the team of France Bellisle, Bernard Guy-Grand, and J. Le Magnen at Hotel-Dieu Hospital in Paris. Bellisle, Guy-Grand, and Le Magnen published their mastication report in the journal Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews.
It’s worth noting that Bellisle made waves in 2001, when she and collaborator Anne-Marie Daliz reported, as part of a larger study, that women who eat lunch while listening to a recorded detective story take in more food than women who don’t.
The technical details of the Bellisle, Guy-Grand, and Le Magnen study are worth, as they say, chewing over: ‘Cocktail size (3 square centimeters) open sandwiches were served in one of five different flavors. An oscillographic recording of chewing and swallowing showed that chewing activity varied with the palatability and variety of foods. Chewing time was shorter and fewer chews were observed as palatability increased. Swallowing did not change as a function of stimulus flavor. Pause duration between two successive food pieces became shorter as palatability increased. The effects of sensory factors were most evident at the beginning of meals and decreased until the end of meals.’
Let me partially digest that passage, and then regurgitate it in plain language. The scientists make three points:
people chew delicious food more quickly than they chew horrible food;
people race to put delicious food in their mouths, but with horrible food they hesitate; and
people enjoy a meal more when they are hungry than when they are full.
These are good things to know – and we now know them scientifically. But that is not all we know. And edograms figured into our knowledge.
An edogram is a graph with two wavy lines: one line zigs every time a person chews, the other line zags every time the person swallows. In doing their study, the three scientists learned that ordinary people can become highly accustomed to wearing the ungainly equipment used in making the edogram. Here is a condensed passage from the official report: ‘During test meals, the strain gauge was placed on the subject’s cheek. A small balloon, filled with water, was maintained on the subje
ct’s throat by an adjustable elastic collar. The subjects did not report any discomfort from the apparatus. One subject even fell asleep briefly during a meal, with her head resting on the table.’
For hosts and hostesses who obsess about their housekeeping rather than their cooking, this is good news. If you have tasty enough food – or in a pinch, if you simply have enough food – your guests will be able to ignore any distractions. Unless you read them a detective story while they are eating.
Bellisle, France, B. Guy-Grand, and J. Le Magnen (2000). ‘Chewing and Swallowing as Indices of the Stimulation to Eat During Meals in Humans: Effects Revealed by the Edogram Method and Video Recordings.’ Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 24 (2): 223–28.
Bellisle, France, and Anne-Marie Dalix (2001). ‘Cognitive Restraint Can Be Offset by Distraction, Leading to Increased Meal Intake in Women.’ American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 74 (2): 197–200.
Five
Eat, Think, and Be Merry
May We Recommend
‘Effect of Ale, Garlic, and Soured Cream on the Appetite of Leeches’
by Anders Barheim and Hogne Sandvik (published in BMJ, 1994, and honoured with the 1996 Ig Nobel Prize in biology)
Some of what’s in this chapter: Gut rumbling for shrinks • The tasting of the shrew • Taste-testing water, with rats • Eating eggs, eggs, eggs, and then some • How and why to explode meat • Tasty pet food • The Attitudes to Chocolate Questionnaire • Wondering about whisky and candles • Standard glops of food • Teabags • The frailty of bunnies
Your Gut Says ...
Some psychoanalysts can find meaning in the most ordinary-seeming bits of your life. Some discern it even in your intestinal rumblings. There’s a technical name for those digestive sounds: borborygmi. Several published studies tell how to interpret people’s gut feelings – how to translate those borborygmi into common everyday words.
In 1984, Christian Müller of Hôpital de Cery in Prilly, Switzerland, published a report called ‘New Observations on Body Organ Language’ in the journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomics. Müller paraphrases a 1918 essay, by someone named Willener, which ‘concludes that the phenomenon generally known as borborygmi must be regarded as cryptogrammatically encoded body signals that could be interpreted with the help of [special] apparatus’. Müller laments that Willener’s ‘attempts to follow up on his theory were thwarted by the defects of recording techniques at that time’.
Happily, Müller himself had access to later, better equipment. ‘We have been trying at our clinic since 1980’, he writes, ‘to combine electromesenterography with Spindel’s alamograph, and in addition to use digital transformation for a quantitative analysis of the curves via computer.’
Müller reveals his greatest interpretive triumph: ‘The presence of a negative transference situation was not difficult to deduce from the following sequence: “Ro ... Pi ... le ... me ... 1o …”. The following translation is certainly an appropriate rendering: “Rotten pig. Leave me alone.”’
This lovely piece of deadpan, intentional nonsense, I am told, was swallowed whole by some readers, and perhaps also some journal editors.
A few years later, Guy Da Silva, a Montreal psychoanalyst, published several apparently quite serious papers about the psychoanalytical significance of borborygmi.
The most accessible (in my view, anyway) is his ‘Borborygmi as Markers of Psychic Work During the Analytic Session. A Contribution to Freud’s Experience of Satisfaction and to Bion’s Idea About the Digestive Model for the Thinking Apparatus’. This professionally dense monograph appeared in a 1990 issue of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. Freud is Sigmund Freud, the psychoanalysis pioneer who lived in Vienna, Austria. Bion is Wilfred Ruprecht Bion, director of the London Clinic of Psychoanalysis in the 1950s, and later president of the British Psychoanalytical Society.
Guy Da Silva digested a little Freud together with a little Bion. He writes: ‘Borborygmi may signal the process and acquisition of new thoughts (symbolization) and the free associations derived from borborygmi often provide the key to the understanding of the session by linking the verbal flow of ideas to the underlying sensory and affective experience, thereby providing a “moment of truth”. Within the primitive maternal transference, borborygmi are often accompaniments to the fantasy or the hallucination of being fed by the analyst.’
The name Guy DaSilva will be familiar to some readers as the star of hundreds of psychologically gut-wrenching films, among them Beyond Reality 3, The Lube Guy, Attack of the Killer Dildos, and Porn-O-Matic 2000. But Guy DaSilva the actor and Guy Da Silva the psychoanalyst are not the same person, no matter how similarly stimulating their work may be.
Müller, Christian (1984). ‘New Observations on Body Organ Language.’ Psychotherapy and Psychosomics 42 (1–4): 124–26.
Da Silva, Guy (1990). ‘Borborygmi as Markers of Psychic Work During the Analytic Session. A Contribution to Freud’s Experience of Satisfaction and to Bion’s Idea About the Digestive Model for the Thinking Apparatus.’ International Journal of Psychoanalysis 71: 641–59.
–– (1998). ‘The Emergence of Thinking: Bion as the Link Between Freud and the Neurosciences.’ In M. Grignon (ed.) Psychoanalysis and the Zest for Living: Reflections and Psychoanalytic Writings in Memory of W. C. M. Scott. Binghamton, N.Y.: ESF Publishers.
The Tasting of the Shrew
If you like shrews, especially if you like them parboiled, you’ll want to devour a study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science. Called ‘Human Digestive Effects on a Micromammalian Skeleton’, it explains how and why one of its authors – either Brian D. Crandall or Peter W. Stahl, we are not told which – ate and excreted a ninety-millimetre-long (excluding the tail, which added another twenty-four millimetres) northern short-tailed shrew (species name: Blarina brevicauda).
This was, in technical terms, ‘a preliminary study of human digestive effects on a small insectivore skeleton’, with ‘a brief discussion of the results and their archaeological implications’.
Crandall and Stahl are anthropologists at the State University of New York in Binghamton. The shrew was a local specimen, procured via snap trapping at an unspecified location not far from the school.
For the experiment’s input, preparation was exacting. After being skinned and eviscerated, the report says, ‘the carcass was lightly boiled for approximately 2 minutes and swallowed without mastication in hind and forelimb, head, and body and tail portions’.
Here’s how Crandall and Stahl handled the output: ‘Faecal matter was collected for the following 3 days. Each faeces was stirred in a pan of warm water until completely disintegrated. This solution was then decanted through a quadruple-layered cheesecloth mesh. Sieved contents were rinsed with a dilute detergent solution and examined with a hand lens for bone remains.’ They then examined the most interesting bits with a scanning electron microscope, at magnifications ranging from 10 to 1000 times.
Digestive damage to a (left) surviving shrew humerus and (right) surviving shrew tibio-fibula
A shrew has lots of bony parts. All of them entered Crandall’s gullet, or maybe Stahl’s. But despite extraordinary efforts to find and account for each bone at journey’s end, many went missing. One of the major jawbones disappeared. So did four of the twelve molar teeth, several of the major leg and foot bones, nearly all of the toe bones, and all but one of the thirty-one vertebrae. And the skull, reputedly a very hard chunk of bone, emerged with what the report calls ‘significant damage’.
The vanishing startled the scientists. Remember, they emphasize in their paper that this meal was simply gulped down: ‘The shrew was ingested without chewing; any damage occurred as the remains were processed internally. Mastication undoubtedly damages bone, but the effects of this process are perhaps repeated in the acidic, churning environment of the stomach.’
Chewing, they almost scream at their colleagues, is only part of the story. In each little heap of remains from a
ncient meals, there be mystery aplenty.
Prior to this experiment, archaeologists had to, and did, make all kinds of assumptions about the animal bones they dug up – especially as to what those partial skeletons might indicate about the people who presumably consumed them. Crandall and Stahl, through their disciplined lack of mastication, have given their colleagues something toothsome to think about.
Crandall, Brian D., and Peter W. Stahl (1995). ‘Human Digestive Effects on a Micromammalian Skeleton.’ Journal of Archaeological Science 22 (6): 789–97.
May We Recommend
‘Pharyngeal Irritation After Eating Cooked Tarantula’
by Stephen J. Traub, Robert S. Hoffman, and Lewis S. Nelson (published in the Internet Journal of Medical Toxicology, 2001)
The Water Test
The study ‘Similar Preference for Natural Mineral Water between Female College Students and Rats’ pulls off a nice bit of interspecies diplomacy. Reading it end to end, you would be hard pressed to say who – the women or the rats – was most intended to benefit from the research.
Written by Esumi Yukiko of Shimane Women’s Junior College in Matsui, Japan, and Ohara Ikuo of Kobe Women’s University, and published in the Journal of Home Economics of Japan, this six-page monograph describes an apparently straightforward experiment.
The authors explain that their work was partly inspired by a simple fact: ‘The Society for the Study of Tasty Water, which is sponsored by the Ministry of Public Welfare, proposed hardness to be one of the most important requirements for tasty water.’ Therefore, they say, ‘The objectives of this study are to investigate the best mineral water for drinking by using hardness as an index, and whether the response of rats to mineral water can be extrapolated to that of humans.’
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