by Unknown
Eyes wide open
Some people can sleep through anything. Earthquakes, gunshots, bright lights—nothing rouses them. But these are people who are already asleep. In 1960, Ian Oswald of the University of Edinburgh, UK, wondered how much stimulus someone could be exposed to while awake and still drop off. Would it even be possible to fall asleep with your eyes open?
Oswald first asked his volunteers to lie down on a couch. Then he taped their eyes open. Directly in front of them, about 50 centimetres away, he placed a bank of flashing lights. No matter how much they rolled their eyes, they could not avoid looking at the lights. Electrodes attached to their legs delivered a series of painful shocks. As a finishing touch, Oswald blasted ‘very loud’ music into their ears.
Three young men volunteered to be Oswald’s guinea pigs. In his write-up, Oswald praised them for their fortitude. Yet, all the lights and noise and pain made no difference. Once they were tired, an electroencephalograph showed all three men to be asleep within 12 minutes. Oswald worded his findings cautiously: ‘There was a considerable fall of cerebral vigilance, and a large decline in the presumptive ascending facilitation from the brain-stem reticular formation to the cerebral cortex.’ The men themselves were more straightforward. They said it felt like they had dozed off.
Oswald speculated that the key lay in the monotonous nature of the stimuli. Faced with such monotony, he suggested, the brain goes into a kind of trance. That may explain why it’s easy to doze off, even in the middle of the day, while you are driving along an empty road. How much this will help when sleep eludes you while you’re stuck on a red-eye flight is another question. Asking the baby in the row behind you to scream more rhythmically is unlikely to do the trick.
Slumber learning
In the summer of 1942, Lawrence LeShan of The College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, US, stood in the darkness of a cabin in an upstate New York camp where a row of young boys lay sleeping. He intoned a single phrase, over and over: ‘My fingernails taste terribly bitter. My fingernails taste terribly bitter…’ Anyone happening upon the scene might have thought LeShan had gone mad, but he had not. The professor was conducting a sleep-learning experiment.
All the boys had been diagnosed as chronic nail-biters, and LeShan wanted to find out if nocturnal exposure to a negative suggestion could cure them. Initially he used a phonograph to faithfully repeat the phrase 300 times a night as the boys lay sleeping. One month into the experiment, a nurse discreetly checked their nails during a routine medical examination. One boy seemed to have kicked the habit. LeShan remarked that skin of a healthy texture had replaced the ‘coarse wrinkled skin of the habitual biter’.
Then, five weeks into the investigation, disaster struck. The phonograph broke. Faced with having to abandon the experiment, LeShan began standing in the darkness and delivering the suggestion himself. Surprisingly, direct delivery had greater effect. Within two weeks, seven more boys had healthy nails. LeShan speculated that this was because his voice was clearer than the phonograph. Another possibility would be that his midnight confessions thoroughly spooked the children. ‘If I stop biting my nails,’ they probably thought, ‘the strange man will go away.’
By the end of the summer, LeShan found that 40 per cent of the boys had kicked the habit, and concluded that the sleep-learning effect seemed to be real. Other researchers later disputed this. In a 1956 experiment at Santa Monica College in California, William Emmons and Charles Simon used an electroencephalograph to measure the brain activity of subjects, making sure they were fully asleep before playing a message. Under these conditions, the sleep-learning effect disappeared.
The masked tickler
In 1933, Clarence Leuba, a professor of psychology at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio made his home the setting for an ambitious experiment. He planned to find out whether laughter is a learned response to being tickled or an innate one.
To achieve this goal, he determined never to allow his newborn son to associate laughter with tickling. This meant that no one—in particular his wife—was allowed to laugh in the presence of the child while tickling or being tickled. Leuba planned to observe whether his son eventually laughed when tickled, or grew up dismissing wiggling fingers in his armpits with a stony silence.
Somehow Leuba got his wife to promise to cooperate, and the Leuba household became a tickle-free zone, except during experimental sessions in which Leuba subjected R. L. Male, as he referred to his son in his research notes, to laughter-free tickling.
During these sessions, Leuba followed a strict procedure. First he donned a 30-centimetre by 40-centimetre cardboard mask, while as a further precaution maintaining a ‘smileless, sober expression’ behind it. Then he tickled his son in a predetermined pattern—first light, then vigorous—in order of armpits, ribs, chin, neck, knees, then feet.
Everything went well until 23 April 1933, when Leuba recorded that his wife had made a confession. On one occasion, after her son’s bath, she had ‘bounced him up and down while laughing and saying, “Bouncy, Bouncy”.’ It is not clear if this was enough to ruin the experiment. What is clear is that by month seven, R. L. Male was happily screaming with laughter when tickled.
Undeterred, Leuba repeated the experiment after his daughter, E. L. Female, was born in February 1936. He obtained the same result. By the age of seven months, his daughter was laughing when tickled.
Leuba concluded that laughter must be an innate response to being tickled. However, one senses a hesitation in his conclusion, as if he felt that it all might have been different if only his wife had followed his rules more carefully. Leuba’s tickle study does at least offer an object lesson to other researchers. In any experiment it is all but impossible to control all the variables, especially when one of the variables is your spouse.
The look of eugh
Do emotions evoke characteristic facial expressions? Is there one expression everyone uses to convey shock, another for disgust, and so on? In 1924, Carney Landis, a graduate student in psychology at the University of Minnesota, designed an experiment to find out.
Landis brought subjects into his lab and drew lines on their faces with a burnt cork so that he could more easily see the movement of their muscles. He then exposed them to a variety of stimuli designed to provoke a strong emotional reaction. For instance, he made them smell ammonia, listen to jazz, look at pornographic pictures and put their hand into a bucket of frogs. As they reacted to each stimulus, he snapped pictures of their faces.
The climax of the experiment arrived when Landis carried in a live white rat on a tray and asked them to decapitate it. Most people initially resisted his request. They questioned whether he was serious. Landis assured them he was. The subjects would then hesitantly pick the knife up and put it back down. Many of the men swore. Some of the women started to cry. Nevertheless, Landis urged them on. In the pictures Landis took, we see them hovering over the rat with their painted faces, knife in hand. They look like members of some strange cult preparing to offer a sacrifice to the Great God of the Experiment.
Two-thirds of the subjects eventually did as they’d been told. Landis noted that most of them performed the task clumsily: ‘The effort and attempt to hurry usually resulted in a rather awkward and prolonged job of decapitation.’ Even when the subject refused, the rat did not get a reprieve. Landis simply picked up the knife and decapitated the rodent himself.
With hindsight, Landis’s experiment presented a stunning display of the willingness of people to obey orders, no matter how unpalatable. It anticipated the results of Stanley Milgram’s more famous obedience experiment at Yale University by almost 40 years. Landis, however, never realised that the compliance of his subjects was more interesting than their facial expressions. He remained single-mindedly focused on his research topic. And no, he was never able to find a single, characteristic facial expression that people adopt while decapitating a rat.
Terror in the skies
One day in the ear
ly 1960s, ten soldiers boarded a plane at Fort Hunter Liggett military base in California on what they thought was a routine training mission. The plane climbed into the clear blue sky, levelled out at around 5000 feet and cruised for a few minutes before suddenly lurching to one side as a propeller failed.
The pilot struggled with the controls and yelled frantically into his headset. Finally, he made an announcement over the intercom: ‘We have an emergency. An engine has stalled and the landing gear is not functioning. I’m going to attempt to ditch in the ocean. Please prepare yourself.’
In such a situation, it would have been natural for the soldiers to feel fear or even terror. But there was no need. Though they didn’t know it, they were in no danger. They were unwitting subjects in a study designed by the United States Army Leadership Human Research Unit near Monterey, California. Its purpose was to examine behavioural degradation under psychological stress—specifically, the stress of imminent death.
Having created a fear-arousing situation, the researchers next introduced a task to measure the soldiers’ performance under pressure. The task was something most people find difficult under normal circumstances: filling out insurance forms. A steward distributed the paperwork, explaining it as a bureaucratic necessity. If they were all going to die, the army wanted to make sure it was covered for the loss.
Obediently, the soldiers leaned forward in their seats, pencils in hand, and set to work. They found the forms unexpectedly difficult to decipher, and quite likely they attributed this to the distraction of approaching death. In fact, the forms had deliberately been written in a confusing manner. They were, as the researchers put it, ‘an example of deliberately bad human engineering’. Eventually the last soldier completed his form, and they all steeled themselves for the crash. At that point the pilot turned the plane around: ‘Just kidding about that emergency, folks’, and landed safely at the airfield.
Not surprisingly, anticipating a crash landing did interfere with the ability to accurately complete an insurance form. The soldiers in the plane made a significantly larger number of mistakes than did a control group on the ground who filled out the same paperwork.
Quite what the soldiers thought about their ordeal we don’t know, but one of them did find a way to get even. When the plane next took off carrying a new group of subjects to terrify, the researchers discovered their experiment had been ruined. One of the earlier group had blown their cover by writing a warning message on his airsick bag.
What wags some of these eggheads can be. Aussie engineers, meanwhile, are a little more pragmatic, opting out of placing themselves in any danger and calling instead on feathered brethren. Their research is also an illustration of how much attitudes to animal suffering have changed in little more than a decade. Presumably artificial duck cadavers would be used in the caring 21st century.
Duck!
Ducks and other birds flying into the engines of low-flying aircraft are a hazard at many airports around the world. In 1995, Gas Turbine News reported that Australian engineers were researching the problem.
The difficulty they faced was how to simulate a duck flying into an engine to study what damage is caused and how it can be avoided. Their solution was not to simulate it at all. Instead they developed a gun that fired ducks at speeds of up to 273 kilometres an hour into their test engines.
They claimed that the ducks were humanely dispatched prior to being shot at the engines. We should hope so.
The ducks did not die in vain, as passengers on US Airways Flight 1549, which ditched with no loss of life in the Hudson River in January 2009 after a bird strike, will no doubt testify. Rather more prosaic, but still within the boundaries of eggheadism, comes the kind of research that tells us how to live our mundane existence more easily. Vacuum cleaners, queuing at bus stops…scientists can really improve your lot.
Let it soothe as it sweeps as it cleans
In 1995, Frédérique Guyot, a PhD student at the acoustics laboratory of Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, made it her goal to identify what made the sound of a vacuum cleaner either intolerably irritating or pleasantly soothing. Armed with this knowledge, she hoped that manufacturers would be able to ensure that future models would make only the nicest of noises.
To find out what people hated most about the noise of their machines, Guyot recorded the sounds of 23 vacuum cleaners as they worked on a rug in an office. She played the recordings to 56 volunteers, who were instructed to imagine themselves pushing the vacuum cleaner around, and to describe their feelings about each sound. Machines were grouped into categories that ranged from ‘best’ through ‘classical’ to ‘appalling’.
Guyot said that, unsurprisingly, loud vacuum cleaners were less popular than quiet ones. ‘And ones that sound like a musical note—“hmmm”—are more unpleasant than those that just go “fffff”,’ she said. Least popular of all were loud appliances with high-pitched hums.
Lazy option is best
Ever lost patience waiting for a bus and decided to walk instead? Next time, stick around—it’s nearly always the best strategy.
In 2008, Scott Kominers, a mathematician at Harvard University, and his colleagues derived a formula for the optimal time that you should wait for a tardy bus at each stop en route before giving up and walking on. ‘Many mathematicians probably ponder this on their way to work, but never get round to working it out,’ he said.
The team found that the solution was surprisingly simple. When both options seemed reasonably attractive, the formula advised you to choose the ‘lazy’ option: wait at the first stop, no matter how frustrating. The formula did break down in extreme cases, when the time interval between buses was longer than an hour, for example, and your destination only a kilometre away.
If you did choose to walk, you should make your decision before you start waiting, he said. You would still reach your destination later than the bus you’d have caught, but it would be much less frustrating than waiting for a while and then watching the bus shoot by. ‘It certainly has changed the way I travel,’ Kominers said.
Of course, missing a bus is annoying, and waiting for ever for one that doesn’t come is probably even worse. But standing in line is a cinch compared to putting your body on the line. That’s a different thing entirely.
‘Bear-proof’ suit to be put to the test
In December 2001, a Canadian man and a 3-metre, 585-kilogram Kodiak bear were set to face off, in an attempt to test a handmade, purportedly bear-proof suit.
The suit and its maker, Troy Hurtubise of North Bay, Ontario, won a 1998 Ig Nobel prize—awarded annually for improbable research projects—and an entry in the 2002 Guinness Book of World Records for the most expensive research suit ever constructed. Fifteen years of tinkering and US$100,000 went into the design, which incorporated plastic, rubber, chainmail, galvanised steel, titanium—and thousands of metres of duct tape.
The suit proved itself to be virtually indestructible. It survived two strikes with a 136-kilogram tree trunk, 18 collisions with a 3-tonne truck at 50 kilometres an hour, and numerous strikes by arrows, bullets, axes and baseball bats. ‘I’ve never had a bruise,’ said Hurtubise. But the suit had never come up against the very thing it was meant to protect against—a grizzly bear. On 9 December 2001, in an undisclosed location in western Canada, all that changed. In a ‘controlled attack’, the Kodiak, a larger, heavier subspecies of the grizzly, was to put it to the test.
The bear, which appeared on TV commercials and in movies, was to be instructed by its handler to attack for ten seconds. Showbiz aside, Hurtubise stressed that it was a real bear. ‘Real teeth, real claws, real power,’ he said. He fully expected the outside of the suit to be ripped to shreds. ‘The suit’s a toy to the bear,’ he said. ‘He’ll make his way to the titanium.’
Hurtubise was banking on the titanium layers around the chest, head and lower body to protect him. ‘If there’s a weakness,’ he said, ‘it would be the chainmail joints.’ Hurtubise said he was exci
ted, but a little anxious too. ‘Little things like trucks and baseball bats and axes and things—you don’t feel that,’ he said. ‘This is a bear.’
So? What happened?
Bear-proof suit has surprise results
The first live tests of Troy Hurtubise’s grizzly-proof suit in 2001 found that its best protective feature was its bizarre appearance. Hurtubise donned the suit and squared up to a 145-kilogram female grizzly but the bear just found it too weird. When confronted by Hurtubise in the Ursus Mark VI suit, the bear smelled a human, but saw an alien. ‘There’s no grizzly that’s going to come near you in that suit,’ the bear handler told him, after he spent ten minutes in a cage with the cowering animal.
The grizzly test was supposed to be the first live encounter. In an earlier test, the suit had to go it alone, without Hurtubise inside, with a fearsome opponent—a 545-kilogram male Kodiak. The suit was placed into the cage of the giant bear, to get him accustomed to it. Eventually, the bear began to sniff the contraption, and then proceeded to jump on it. ‘You could hear the metal straining,’ said Hurtubise. ‘He started to investigate the thing with claw and tooth.’
Though it ripped off chunks of rubber, all was well until the bear began to shred the protective chainmail and was called off by the handler. Hurtubise learned that you should never skimp on chainmail. ‘I should have used shark chainmail,’ he lamented. ‘Instead, I sent away for butcher’s chainmail from France.’
Without effective chainmail, the bear handler decided not to allow an attack with Hurtubise inside the suit. But he did permit Hurtubise to take on the smaller female grizzly, although no contact was allowed. It took the bear a while to approach but soon enough it was just six inches away. ‘I could feel her breath coming through my visor,’ said Hurtubise. ‘I was terrified.’