QI: The Book of General Ignorance - The Noticeably Stouter Edition

by John Lloyd

  The real damage caused by television is the lazy lifestyle it creates. Obesity rates among children in the UK have tripled in the last twenty years, and this has been linked to television. The average UK child aged between three and nine years old spends fourteen hours a week watching television and just over an hour playing sport or doing outdoor activities.

  A 2004 study in the journal Pediatrics concluded that children who watched two to three hours’ television a day had a 30 per cent higher chance of developing attention deficit disorder (ADD).

  In 2005, the research company Nielsen revealed that the average US home tuned in to eight hours of television per day. This is 12.5 per cent higher than ten years ago, and the highest level since television viewing figures were first measured in the 1950s.

  The American Academy of Pediatrics estimates that by the time they reach the age of seventy, Americans will have spent an average of eight whole years watching television.

  What do newborn babies like best?

  Not much, it seems, and (sadly) not Mummy.

  Unlike many creatures, humans don’t ‘imprint’ quickly. While mothers and fathers may form an immediate bond with their baby, it takes most babies between two and three months to show any strong preference for a particular human carer.

  Despite the homespun wisdom that says its essential to place a baby with its mother immediately after birth, this is probably more for the mother’s benefit than the baby’s. Research into the development of human attachments at the University of Minnesota in 1999 showed that the bonding process is much slower than most of us assume. It outlined the following steps:

  16 hours babies prefer the sound of human language to other noises (at least, they start making rhythmic body movements, which psychologists assume means they’re excited). They have no preference for particular voices.

  2 days babies can tell the difference between their mothers’ faces and that of a stranger, but they still appear to show no preference.

  3 days babies clearly prefer human voices, especially their mother’s.

  5 days babies clearly prefer the smell of their own mother’s milk.

  3–5 weeks babies become especially interested in faces, and particularly in their mother’s eyes.

  3–4 months babies start initiating social contact with their mother (or other primary carer).

  3–7 months babies start to show strong preferences for other members of their own family.

  The concept of ‘imprinting’ was made famous by the Austrian animal behaviourist Konrad Lorenz (1903–89), who demonstrated that greylag geese hatched in an incubator would bond with, or ‘imprint’ on, the first moving thing they saw within thirty-six hours of birth (in the original case, it was Lorenz’s Wellington boots).

  This fact has been used to great advantage in breeding programmes for endangered species of cranes, where their eggs are hatched and reared using hand puppets, humans in crane-costumes and taped calls.

  However, there is no evidence that humans imprint in the same way. Indeed a Canadian research team recently found that, up to the age of three months, newborn humans respond almost as positively to the calls of rhesus monkeys as they do to their mother’s sweet nothings.

  How much sleep should you have every night?

  It is, apparently, dangerous to have eight hours’ sleep a night.

  Adults who sleep eight hours a night or more die younger than those who sleep only six to seven hours a night.

  A six-year study involving 1.1 million people published by Professor Daniel Kripke at the University of California in 2004 showed that a significantly larger number of people who slept eight or more hours (or less than four hours) a night died during the six-year study.

  The average Briton gets between six and seven hours’ sleep a night, which is one and a half hours less every night than our grandparents did. In 1900, a normal night’s sleep was nine hours.

  There is evidence to suggest that sleep deprivation leads to short-term loss of IQ, memory and the ability to reason.

  Leonardo da Vinci spent almost half his life asleep. Like Einstein, he took short naps during the day, in his case fifteen minutes every four hours. The great lexicographer Dr Johnson rarely got up before noon. The French philosopher Pascal also spent much of his day dozing in bed.

  On the other hand, the famously long-lived elephant sleeps for only two hours a day. Koalas sleep for twenty-two hours a day but only live ten years. Ants, as noted earlier, sleep for only a few minutes a day.

  The average person takes seven minutes to fall asleep. Normal healthy sleepers wake up between fifteen and thirty-five times every night.

  There are currently eighty-four recognised sleep disorders, including insomnia, excessive snoring, narcolepsy (falling asleep during the day), apnoea (ceasing to breathe while asleep) and restless leg syndrome. The UK has twenty-five sleep clinics, all of which are ‘overwhelmed’ with patients.

  Twenty per cent of all UK motorway accidents are caused by drivers falling asleep. The best way to stop this happening is to trap a lock of your hair in the sun-roof.

  The second-best way is to eat an apple. This stimulates digestion and provides slow-release energy, which is more effective than the short-term hit of coffee.

  What will be the biggest killer in the world by 2030?

  a) Tuberculosis

  b) AIDS

  c) Malaria

  d) Tobacco

  e) Murder

  According to the World Health Organisation, tobacco is currently the second major cause of death in the world. It is responsible for the death of one in ten adults worldwide, about five million deaths each year, while cancer is currently killing seven million people a year.

  If figures continue to rise at current levels, tobacco – and a range of smoking-related diseases – will become the world’s biggest killer by 2030, killing ten million people a year.

  Around 1.3 billion people are regular smokers. Half of them – that is 650 million people – will eventually be killed by tobacco.

  Developing countries will suffer the most. Eighty-four per cent of smokers currently reside in middle- to low-income countries, where smoking has been steadily on the increase since 1970.

  In contrast, smoking levels among men from the United States declined from 55 per cent in the 1950s to 28 per cent in the 1990s. In the Middle East – where half the adult males smoke – tobacco consumption increased 24 per cent between 1990 and 1997.

  The economic consequences of smoking in the developing world are just as disastrous as the implications for health. In places like Niger, Vietnam and Bangladesh, impoverished households are spending one third more on tobacco products than on food.

  It was not until the late 1940s that modern science linked disease to tobacco and, in the UK, it wasn’t until the Royal College of Physicians report in 1964 that the government fully accepted the link between smoking and cancer. It was another seven years before warnings appeared on cigarette packets.

  Despite thirty years of mounting evidence, one in four UK adults (13 million people) continue to smoke regularly (although 70 per cent of those are trying to give up).

  In 2004, the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan not only banned smoking in public, but also banned tobacco sales, the first country ever to do so.

  What illness do British doctors treat most often?

  a) The common cold

  b) Ear infections

  c) Depression

  d) Sleep disorders

  Depression is the commonest illness treated by doctors in Britain and the fourth commonest illness in the world after pneumonia/bronchitis, diarrhoea and HIV/AIDS (WHO 1999).

  It is estimated that up to 10 per cent of women and 3 to 5 per cent of men worldwide suffer from clinical (i.e. severe) depression in any given year.

  Approximately 3.2 million people in Britain (7 per cent) are clinically depressed and it’s getting worse. Between 1990 and 2000, the number of prescriptions written for depression every year in the UK ro
se by more than ten million.

  It is estimated that depression costs the UK economy £8 billion a year through time off work, treatment costs, suicides and reduced productivity – equivalent to £160 a year for every man, woman and child.

  This is not just a function of innate British miserabilism or climate: 25 million Americans (9 per cent) are clinically depressed at any one time. In Australia, children as young as five are currently being treated for depression.

  In Bangladesh, by far the commonest illness is diarrhoea, followed by intestinal worm infections. But depression is widespread (particularly among women), running at about 3 per cent.

  In Africa, depression is the eleventh most common illness, HIV and malaria being first and second. In most developing countries, cultural suspicion of mental illness means diagnosis is difficult and symptoms are more likely to manifest themselves physically than in the West.

  STEPHEN What illness do British doctors now treat more than any other?

  ANDY Is it a little niggle that you’re not quite sure what it is … but you think it’ll be enough to keep you off work for the rest of the week?

  Is the answer to depression just to ‘walk it off’?

  Yes. It’s at least as effective as drugs.

  Recent research involving subjects aged twenty-four to forty-five found that half an hour’s exercise three to five times a week has the same (or better) effect on depression than drugs, regularly reducing symptoms by nearly 50 per cent.

  According to Science News, placebos are more effective at curing depression than either drugs or herbal remedies. In a series of trials carried out between 1979 and 1996, Seattle psychiatrist Dr Arif Khan found that St John’s Wort completely cured 24 per cent of cases, the anti-depressant drug Zoloft cured 25 per cent of cases, but the sugar-pill placebos effected a complete cure in 32 per cent of patients.

  In a more recent study comparing the anti-depressants Prozac and Efexor with placebos, the drugs won with a 52 per cent cure rate, but the placebos still scored impressively with 38 per cent. But as soon as the deception was revealed, the patients’ condition worsened rapidly.

  Many commentators believe that the context of the treatment – a clinical trial with lots of professional attention being paid to the participants – was an important factor. The conclusion seems to be that a combination of drugs and personal care produces the quickest and longest-lasting cure.

  Meditation also seems to work. In a research project involving Tibetan monks recommended by the Dalai Lama, Richard Davidson, Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, asked the monks to meditate on ‘unconditional loving-kindness and compassion’.

  The result was an extraordinary pattern of gamma brainwaves, usually very difficult to detect. The implication seems to be that, if trained to do so, the brain can produce its own dopamine – the chemical whose lack causes depression.

  Using drugs leads your brain stop producing its own dopamine almost completely.

  By training yourself to ‘be positive’ you can make yourself cheerful again. This may also be why placebos work: belief is a powerful thing.

  STEPHEN Swimming with dolphins. That’s apparently a very good treatment for depression.

  SEAN Not if they reject you. Not if they go [makes disparaging dolphin noises] and off they go. That takes you to another level.

  Which country has the world’s highest suicide rate?

  Lithuania, which in 2003 boasted an astonishing forty-two suicides per 100,000 of population. This is over 1,500 people: more than are killed by traffic accidents and twice as many as a decade ago.

  To put it in an international context Lithuanian suicides outstrip the British figure by six to one, the USA’s by five to one, and are almost three times the world average. Nobody knows why, but it is interesting that seven of the top ten suicide nations are Baltic states or other former members of the Soviet Union. Perhaps it’s because Lithuania also has the world’s highest density of neurologists.

  Across the world, including the Baltic, the people most likely to commit suicide are men (young and old) living in rural areas. This makes sense: anyone who’s spent time on a struggling farm knows that alcohol, isolation, debt, the weather and the inability to ask for help (known by psychologists as ‘helpless male’ syndrome), combined with proximity to firearms and dangerous chemicals, make a lethal combination.

  The exceptions are China and southern India where young women in rural areas are most at risk. The respective rates are 30 and 148 per 100,000. In China this is thought to be because young brides are often left isolated by their new husbands, who immediately leave to work in the city. In India, self-immolation accounts for a third of all suicides by teenage girls.

  Suicide, generally, is on the rise – accounting for a million deaths a year, or one every forty seconds. That’s half of all violent deaths: more people now kill themselves than die in wars.

  On the other hand, Sweden, for a long time plagued with the ‘so boring, everyone kills themselves’ tag, is no longer even in the top twenty.

  The precise historical basis of the ‘Swedish suicide’ myth is lost in the fog of post-war reconstruction, but many Swedes blame Dwight D. Eisenhower, President of the USA 1953–61, who used their (at that time) high suicide rate to undermine the cheerful, dangerously anti-capitalist egalitarianism of Swedish social democracy.

  ALAN Do you think it would be interesting if you got all of the suicide notes and published them as a book?

  STEPHEN Wow. Yes.

  ALAN It might find out, actually, what the hell’s going on in Vilnius! ‘It’s the food! They’re all sick of the food here!’

  Which uses more muscles, smiling or frowning?

  Winsome greetings cards and unsolicited emails assure us that it takes many more muscles to frown than to smile – the idea being that you may as well cheer up and be happy, as it takes less effort than being a sourpuss.

  Unfortunately, it’s not strictly true. It actually takes one more muscle to smile than to frown. There are fifty-three muscles in the human face, twelve of which are needed for a nice big smile, while only eleven are needed to frown.

  A genuine smile is technically known as a Duchenne or zygomatic smile. The French neurologist Guillaume Duchenne (1806–75), who began his career electrocuting fishermen, was the first to prove that a sincerely warm smile uses the muscles of the eyes as well as the mouth, and the word zygomatic comes from the Greek zygoma, meaning ‘yoke’, after the two zygomatic muscles that run from each cheekbone to the corner of the mouth.

  As well as these four muscles, smiling takes two muscles to crinkle the eyes, two to pull up the corners of the lips, two to pull them sideways and two to curve the angle of the mouth. Total to smile: twelve. On the other hand, a frown needs two muscles to pull down the lips, three to furrow the brow, one to purse the lips, one to depress the lower lip, two to pull the mouth corners down and two eye crinklers. Total to frown: eleven.

  Despite all this, on balance it may still be easier to smile – largely because, in all but the most miserable cases, people smile much more often than they frown. As a result, our smiling muscles tend to be stronger.

  Incidentally, a cursory, insincere smile only needs two muscles. These are known as the risorius muscles (from the Latin for ‘laughter’) or Santorini’s muscles, after the Italian anatomist Giovanni Santorini (1681–1737) who discovered them, and they are responsible for pulling the corners of the mouth sideways. So, if your object is to fail to spread happiness with the absolute minimum of effort, a fake smile is easily your best bet.

  Was Hitler a vegetarian?

  No.

  It’s a good story. The twentieth century’s worst dictator, with the blood of tens of millions on his hands, was too fastidious, or sentimental, or cranky to eat meat. It’s regularly trotted out – illogically – as a good argument against vegetarianism. Unfortunately, it’s not true.

  Various biographers, including those who knew the dictator int
imately, record his passion for Bavarian sausages, game pie and (according to his chef) stuffed pigeon.

  He was, however, plagued by chronic flatulence, for which his doctors regularly recommended a vegetarian diet (a remedy which will surprise many vegetarians). He also received regular injections of a high-protein serum derived from pulverised bull’s testicles. That’s a long way from a mushroom timbale or lentil bake.

  There is no evidence in his speeches or writings that he was ideologically sympathetic to vegetarianism, and not one of his lieutenants was a veggie. In fact, he was far more likely to have criminalised vegetarians along with Esperanto speakers, conscientious objectors and other detested ‘internationalists’.

  Nor was he an atheist. Here he is in full, unambiguous flow in Mein Kampf (1925): ‘I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews, I am doing the Lord’s work.’ He was to use the same form of words in a Reichstag speech in 1938.

  Three years later he told General Gerhart Engel: ‘I am now, as before, a Catholic and will always remain so.’

  Far from being a ‘godless’ state, Nazi Germany enthusiastically worked with the Catholic Church. Infantry soldiers each wore a belt with Gott mit uns (God is with us) inscribed on the buckle, and blessings of troops and equipment were regular and widespread.