Improbable Research

As the heavens inevitably cover every mountain peak with snow, so do pigeons unstoppably deposit a protective white layer atop every outdoor statue – or so people believed. Yukio Hirose shocked and delighted the world by disproving one of these two supposedly eternal truths. He used arsenic to do it.

Chemistry provides a way to communicate certain messages to birds. Yukio Hirose figured this out after he noticed that something, some mysterious who-knows-what, had consistently attracted the attention of one particular group of pigeons.

In the Kenroku garden in the city of Kanazawa, Japan, stands a statue of the legendary hero Yamato Takeru no Mikoto. There are many things to admire about the statue, but, as a scientist, Professor Hirose was fascinated by how pristine the figure is. Birds rarely visit it, and seldom bestow the kind of personal gifts they often lavish on statuary….

So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.

BONUS: Professor Hirose was awarded the 2003 Ig Nobel Prize in chemistry for this research.

BONUS: Tom Lehrer’s at-least-partially-pertinent song “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park”:

Filmmaker/writer Errol Morris interviews Ig Nobel Prize winner (prize for psychology, 2000, for his and Justin Kruger’s report  ”Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments“) David Dunning, in the New York Times. The interview begins:

The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is

I called David Dunning at his offices at Cornell:

DAVID DUNNING:  Well, my specialty is decision-making.  How well do people make the decisions they have to make in life?  And I became very interested in judgments about the self, simply because, well, people tend to say things, whether it be in everyday life or in the lab, that just couldn’t possibly be true.  And I became fascinated with that.  Not just that people said these positive things about themselves, but they really, really believed them.  Which led to my observation: if you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent.

ERROL MORRIS:  Why not?

DAVID DUNNING:  If you knew it, you’d say, “Wait a minute.  The decision I just made does not make much sense.  I had better go and get some independent advice.”   But when you’re incompetent, the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is.  In logical reasoning, in parenting, in management, problem solving, the skills you use to produce the right answer are exactly the same skills you use to evaluate the answer.  And so we went on to see if this could possibly be true in many other areas.  And to our astonishment, it was very, very true….

Dunning and Kruger’s study:

A new paper is the first (by other authors) to cite the 2010 Ig Nobel Peace Prize-winning paper by Richard Stephens, et al., about how swearing relieves physical pain. The new study is:

“Naturalistically observed swearing, emotional support, and depressive symptoms in women coping with illness,” Megan L Robbins, Elizabeth S Focella, Shelley Kasle, Ana María López, Karen L Weihs, Matthias R Mehl [pictured here], Health Psychology, Vol 30(6), Nov 2011, 789-792. The authors write:

Objective: The goal of this study was to explore the intra- and interpersonal consequences of swearing. Specifically, it investigated what implications swearing has for coping with and adjustment to illness.

Methods: …Participants wore the Electronically Activated Recorder, an unobtrusive observation sampling method that periodically records snippets of ambient sounds, on weekends to track spontaneous swearing in their daily interactions, and completed self-reported measures of depressive symptoms and emotional support.

Conclusion: [Our] exploratory results are consistent with the notion that swearing can sometimes repel emotional support at the expense of psychological adjustment.

BONUS: Richard Stephens, swearing, pain, Stephen Fry, and Brian Blessed, all together on the BBC discussing and demonstrating how swearing relieves pain.

The GEL Conference, in New York City, has just posted video of the talk I did there. This was the conference’s concluding talk:

Jennifer Ouellette looks deep into the sword-swallowing and medical adventures of Ig Nobel Prize winner Dan Meyer, in her essay in Cocktail Party Physics. She begins:

By the Sword: The Science of Sword-Swallowing

A couple of weeks ago, new media mogul Arianna Huffington had an unusual experience: assisting veteran sword swallower Dan Meyer, who was visiting the Huffington Post headquarters in New York City.Meyer heads the Sword Swallowers Association International, based in Antioch, Tennessee. He’s a five-time Guiness Book of World Record Holder, and has appeared on America’s Got Talent. He made it to the finals despite having a visibly squicked-out David Hasselhoff pull the plug halfway through Meyer’s audition performance.

But we’re sure he’s most proud of his 2007 Ig Nobel Prize for Medicine, which he shared with Brian Witcombe, a consulting radiologist at Gloucestershire Royal NHS Foundation Trust in England. They were honored “for their penetrating medical report, ‘Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects,’” which was published to almost no fanfare in the British Medical Journal — maybe because it appeared right around Christmas and people were too busy swallowing Yorkshire pudding and opening prezzies to pay much attention to the findings….

BONUS: The photo below, taken at the 2007 ceremony, Dan Meyer punctuating his and Brian Witcombe’s joint one-minute-long acceptance speech. Meyer and Dr. Witcombe (who is not visible in this photo, having stepped back to give his colleague breathing room) were honored for studying the medical side-effects of sword-swallowing. Nobel Laureates William Lipscomb, Robert Laughlin and Dudley Herschbach can be seen here analyzing Mr. Meyer’s speech. Photo Credit: Alexey Eliseev.