Improbable Research

In Podcast Episode #1051, Marc Abrahams shows an unfamiliar research study to biomedical researcher Chris Cotsapas. Dramatic readings and reactions ensue.

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Chris Cotsapas encounters:

“Postcoital Visual Loss Due to Valsalva Retinopathy,” Michaels, Luke, Naing Latt Tint, and Philip Alexander, BMJ Case Reports, epub October 23, 2014. 

Seth Gliksman, Production Assistant

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The final performance in tonight’s Improbable Dramatic Readings session, at Arisia, was a two-minute-long reading from this research paper:

“Psychotic Visitors to the White House,” Joseph A. Sebastiani and James L. Foy, American Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 122, no. 6, December 1965, pp. 679-86.

The study authors, at the University of Cincinnati and Georgetown University, report: “This study describes an unusual group of hospitalized patients who, with few exceptions, insisted on seeking a personal interview with the President of the United States at his official residence, the White House. Secret Service agents and White House guards met with each visitor initially and weighed the possibility of serious mental illness because of the visitor’s unwillingness to leave or his reasons for trying to see the President.”

Tonight we’ll do our first-ever-teledistant Improbable Dramatic Readings event, at Arisia, 6 pm US eastern time.

The dramatic readers —Sonya Taafe, Mason Porter, Robin Abrahams, Dean Grodzins, David Kessler— all are always-boffo performers, and the material is of course ace.

We (Improbable Research) plan to do lots more online Dramatic Readings events elsewhere, in adapting to the pandemic era.

The lotsa-people-gathered-in-a-performance-space Dramatic Readings events always worked well. This first re-engineered, teledistant event is, for me, especially fun and exciting, full of little how-will-we-manage-to-do-THAT-particular-aspect mysteries. 

Some humans might prefer to read the entirety of this study, rather than see any summary that we or anyone else would provide:

“Monkeys Prefer Reality Television,” Eliza Bliss-Moreau [pictured below], Anthony C. Santistevan, and Christopher J. Machad, PsyAxXiv, DOI 10.31234/osf.io/7drpt, 2021. The authors are at the University of California Davis; Flatiron Health, Inc., New York; and Cuesta College, San Luis Obispo, California.

An experiment looked at whether harmony, in its many meanings, might emerge from a tossing together of musicians. This study tells what happened:

“Musical Coordination in a Large Group Without Plans Nor Leaders,” Louise Goupil, Pierre Saint-Germier, Gaëlle Rouvier, Diemo Schwarz, and Clément Canonne, Scientific Reports, vol. 10, no. 20377, 2020. (Thanks to Tony Tweedale for bringing this to our attention.) The authors explain:

“A widespread belief is that large groups engaged in joint actions that require a high level of flexibility are unable to coordinate without the introduction of additional resources such as shared plans or hierarchical organizations. Here, we put this belief to a test, by empirically investigating coordination within a large group of 16 musicians performing collective free improvisation—a genre in which improvisers aim at creating music that is as complex and unprecedented as possible without relying on shared plans or on an external conductor. We show that musicians freely improvising within a large ensemble can achieve significant levels of coordination, both at the level of their musical actions (i.e., their individual decisions to play or to stop playing) and at the level of their directional intentions (i.e., their intentions to change or to support the music produced by the group).”