Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two of our twenty twenty three entry on the Eganbel Prizes. This is a collection of awards that are given out every year by a scientific humor journal called the Annals of Improbable Research to honor scientific studies and articles that are in some way goofy, goobery,
or likely to cause a chuckle. Now, in the last episode, we talked about this year's honorees in the let's see one was in the Geology and Chemistry category and that was about geologists licking and eating fossils. And then your study. I can't remember what the category was, but it was about turning dead spiders into robot hands.
Oh, yes, that was the Mechanical Engineering Prize, the Realm of Necrobiotics.
That was a high quality entry. But we're back today to talk about a few more of the winners that were selected in twenty twenty three. And Rob, I think you were going to kick things off with the Medicine Prize.
Yes, the Medicine Prize, which concerns knows hairs. So I think this is going to be one that a lot of I think everyone just about everyone out there is going to find something interesting that we can all relate to on some level. The study is the Quantification and Measurement of nasal hairs in a cadaveric population by fam at All. This was published in the International Journal of Dermatology. This was in twenty twenty two.
That word cadaveric or cadaveric, whatever that is that makes it sound like being dead, is like, I don't know, a religion or something, you know, like oh, yes, the cadavericks.
Oh yes, or you know, like a group you need to appeal to politically, Oh, we want to get the cadavereck vote this year. I mean, I guess in the past some people have gone after the cadavereck vote, but that of course is quite illegal.
They don't get to vote. Side show Bob comes to mind.
Yeah, so, yeah, this study concerns nose hair, so I think it will be worthwhile, first of all, just to review what and why these are. There is actually apparently some wiggle room for debate on the exact roles that nose hairs play, which is always kind of fascinating. You need to hear about this because we just kind of take them for granted or we don't even think about them. But generally speaking, we understand them to be air filters. As we breathe through our nose, through our nostrils, the
hairs catch dust, pollen, and other particles. All right, then you're probably wondering, well, then what happens now my nostrils are full of dust and hair. Well, the whole idea here is this keeps them from going straight to your lungs. Instead, they just wind up stuck in the mucus in your nose, So it's eventually going to be swallowed as mucus or blasted out of your nostrils as mucus.
So together the nose hairs and the mucus form a kind of like one two defense system for a particle matter getting into your respiratory system.
Yeah, that's by and large the primary understanding of what they're doing. So if that being the case, they serve an important purpose, and more nose hairs may even help boost our protection at least in some situations with some potential illnesses. There was a believe a twenty eleven study from ostark at All that found that nasal hair density can prevent asthma in patience with seasonal rhinitis, that's inflammation and irritation of the mucous membrane of the nose. Ah.
I never thought of that before. So having a hairier nose could in some situations have benefits.
Right, not necessarily just across the board, but again in some situations with some particular ailments. Uh huh.
Of course.
The thing about nasal hair is that outside of these particulars, we tend not to view it as an attractive feature. I was. I was looking around about this because I was thinking, Okay, you know, with things like eyebrows and so forth, there are often cultural differences. You know, what one culture and in one time period finds, as you know, repulsive, and other finds as attractive, and you know, and so forth.
But I was looking around and I couldn't immediately find any convincing cases where particular culture, in any period of human history went just all in on the beauty of nosehair.
I cannot think of an example, though it sounds like one of those things you wouldn't be surprised if you came across a line in like the song of songs. You know, it's like your nosehairs are like the you know, the eyelashes of butterflies or whatever.
Yeah, yeah, that's the kind of thing I was half expecting to find it maybe out there. If anyone knows of anything like that, certainly right in and let us know. I have. I did run across a couple of sort of like joke videos or articles where if someone was putting like fake eyelashes lashes on their nostrils and saying like, oh, this is the new fad. But as far as I can tell, that's just just humor. But yeah, for the most part, nose hair is something we're either just blissfully
ignorant of. You don't know what your nose hairs are up to, or, as is the case I think with many of us, you end up being painfully aware of what your nose hairs are up to, and you're actively trying to keep them in check, you know, especially as you get older and nose hairs begin to get thicker and longer. Well than it's it's just a constant battle because your body has seems to have decided, you know what we're all in on nose hair. We're all in on ear hair. We don't have enough of any of
these categories. Let's just start pumping it out.
Strange that it does not do the same for head hair as you get older.
Yeah, yeah, and often it can. It can feel like a weird like, why aren't you growing more on the top of the head. Come on, why are you? Why are you diversifying? Like, just focus on the head. So. Yeah, as humans age, the body seems to put increasing emphasis on the need to grow ear and nose hair. This is thought to be due to antigen's sensitivity or the long term exposure of hair fallcules to hormones, so you end up with the hair possibly growing longer and thicker.
This is annoying, I think across the board, I don't think anybody celebrates this so much. Again, unless there's a particular culture or particular time period that I'm missing, and I did not look up ear hair, So it's possible that there's some sort of caveat where you know, particular time and place. Very furry ears we're in fashion. But at least with nose hair, you know, not necessarily a bad thing. Again, with certain ailments, in certain environmental conditions.
So for the most part, for cosmetic reasons, we often try to keep our nose hairs in check. We do things like cut them or trim them. We also them or pluck them. I've never had the ladder, but I understand this to be quite quite an experience because, of course, you know, your nostril is very sensitive. So if anyone has any firsthand experience with the waxing or plucking of
all their nose hairs, let us know. But doctors tend to advise it in order to avoid infections and ingrown hairs, which can be quite painful in that sensitive nasal region, you're better off sticking to cutting and trimming. They seem to believe that, you know, cutting and trimming, all right, that's fine, go ahead and do it, keep things in check. Waxing and plucking maybe reconsider that.
Wait by plucking. Okay, So I've never waxed my nose, But to get maybe too much information out there, I mean I have and I've never plucked in the sense of pulling out all of my nose hair, but I have had like one wild nose hair just sort of like go and doink out in the wrong direction, and what are you supposed to do about that? In that case I have plucked that that nose hair out. Is that something I shouldn't do?
According to the articles I was looking at, Yeah, dermatologists tend to say you're better off not doing that. You're better off isolating that here and trimming it, you know, or trimming all of them. But but then again, it's like you're just kind of it's not like that here is definitely going to get infected when you pluck it, you know. I think people different experiences will will play out different ways. Okay, but but yeah, certainly what do you do in that that long one grows? There's there?
The recent Perry Mason TV show was quite good and John Lithgalt has a has a part in the first season as an elderly attorney who is going through all of these various age related crisses but also just you know, professional as well. But there's a part where he goes on this big he's railing against the young Perry Mason and telling him one day you'll wake up and you'll have a nose hair as long as your arm and so forth. So yeah, it's just it's just part of
getting older. But yeah, go ahead and trim them, say the dermatologists. But coming back to the study, because yes, we have a study here that concerns counting those hairs of the dead. And I think it's easy to think to sort of get into shrimp on a treadmill territory when judging the set face value and say, well, why is this necessary? Why are you You're counting nose hairs, which sounds like just a metaphor for wasting time, and
you're doing it with the dead. What's the purpose here? Well, the study, according to the study itself, they're they're ultimately concerned with things like individuals with alopecia. In medical conditions, you know, where one does not have hair, and we often think of that as well, we think of a head hair, we think of body hair. But of course that's also going to impact your nostrils as well. So
think about everything we just talked about. If you just naturally, due to this condition, do not have nostril hairs, you're missing out on the benefits of this built in filtration system, right, Okay, And therefore the author's stress quote the quantification of nasal hairs and the effects of lack of nasal hairs on a patient's quality of life has yet to be assessed.
So here's where they're going to start recruiting people of the cadaveric persuasion.
Exactly well with the general idea of being like they're going to start with cadavers, and future studies can look at live human beings. But for this small study, they looked at twenty cadavers, ten men and ten women with the mean age of eighty three. They found the average nasal hair count amounts to one hundred and twenty in the left and one hundred and twenty two point two
in the right. Hairs were individually counted and removed. And Joe, if you'll look down in the outline that we share here, I copy and pasted an image from the study where you can actually the cadaver's nose. If you're trying to picture how they counted them. It does appear that they bisected the nostril, cut it in half, and then that enabled them to get at the nose hairs better. I
don't think they read the full study. I don't know that they specifically said that this was their methodology, but clearly in the photo the nose has been sought in half and you see them. It's showing off the nasal hairs for plucking in counting.
I'm really glad you included this visual. It does have a strong heavy metal album cover energy. And oh man, yes, the kind of gray matrix of hair that is like further up in the cavity. I guess you don't think about that. I don't know. I think of nose hairs as being something that's more just like down near the opening of the nostril, but it looks like they go back.
Well, they do get into this a bit, yeah, like where is it thickest. So they found no significant differences count wise between male and female nose hairs, and it seems to be more or less the same history of heart disease did not impact the count but they found cancer related deaths lined up with lower counts overall, but they suspect cancer related therapies or the culprit here and they didn't have all of the medical histories on all
of the cadavers to be one hundred percent certain. No significant location differences between nostrils, and they also stress that the shortcomings of the study are of course the small size of the study, the older ages of the subjects who you know died at advanced age and the lack of demographic and personal details. They add that the anterior location of follicles supports their presumed role as a protective filter.
So more hairs upfront, because this is where you'd want to start intercepting the particles, even if it makes this more annoying from a cosmetic level. So you know, this is why nose hairs may make protrude, because that's where they are situated, because it makes sense to catch all that stuff, okay, And of course they drive home that they want to do future studies with live test subjects, of course without sawing noses in half, I would imagine
in this case. And they will also want to look at people with and without alopecia to better understand the role of nose hairs and the ramifications of their absence. So they seem to drive home that this by and large just an area that we don't have enough data on. And this is also an area where we can appreciate the article beyond its silliness, right, because like your nose is right there, it's right on your face. It's a vital part of our body and we should better understand it.
Yeah, and I would imagine that depending on what they find, this could possibly lead to better treatments or preventative measures for people. For example, if someone has alopecia or some other or has undergone cancer treatment, or has some kind of condition that has rendered them with fewer nose harris than they would normally have, and they also have asthmas something like that, that you might want to have a kind of nose hair prosthesis or something that would do something similar.
Yeah, exactly. They stress that, like, basically, we need to learn more and then probably sort of reevaluate our guidelines for what do we do with people who are lacking nose hairs. So they you know, they stress that synthetic barriers are probably important, but we need to know how important. And what's been done in the past has been using things like aligning of petroleum jelly in the nostril in place of hair, but they say that that's generally not
favored by patients. So I'm guessing that's not pleasant to put up with. And so it's just an area where more more information is required, updated guidelines are required, and who knows, maybe there's some sort of new approach that could be developed. So again, this is just a perfect Ignobel Prize winner because it's just inherently funny because it is about nose hairs. Nose hairs are hilarious, There's no
good getting around it. They're not so hilarious when you're plucking them or trimming them, or noticing them in the rear view mirror on your way to a you know, a job interview or what have you. But are they are nice? The fact that we're dealing with the nosehirs of corpses, of course, adds that extra kind of gallows humor to the affair. But on the other hand, it's important because again the nose is right there in the
center of your face. It plays a very important role in our sensory understanding of the world and our breathing, in our health, and so the more we understand it, the more we can understand, you know, our own health and how to and also how to look out for folks who are lacking in those here for one reason or the other, either you know, do it alopecia or due to cancer therapies or SPA treatments.
Of course, Rob, are you ready to move on to the next one.
Yeah, so what do you have for us, Joe?
Okay, I'm gonna be talking about the twenty twenty three Education Prize which they gave two let's see, it goes to Katie tam Cyanea Poun, Victoria Huie Winan van Tilberg, Christy Wong, Vivian Kwong, gigu In and Christian Chan for a pair of studies trying to explore the limits of just how boring school can get. No, I should note
of special relevance to the IGNO Bells themselves. We rarely watch the awards ceremony for the Ignoblls, but I think they usually upload a video and I've definitely seen some of the award ceremonies in the past. Anyway, I recall from previous years they have this tradition where when an honorees speech is going on too long, you know how at the Oscars they have the music come in to play people off. It's like, Okay, that's enough, you know,
it's time to move on to the next thing. Instead of having the Oscar orchestra come in, they have a child who walks up and starts whining into the microphone, saying please stop I'm bored.
Yeah, And if you want to watch that video or get the full list of winners from this year past years, go to Improbable dot com.
So this research on boredom is, I think, not as hilarious as the Dead Spider hand or some of the other prodigies in the pure weirdness category that we've covered before. But I still think it's pretty clear why the idea of research on boredom is funny. It seems thematically recursive for some reason. The idea of scientifically studying boredom seems itself incredibly boring and also possibly of trifling consequence to society.
But I picked this award because I think it's one of those subjects where our initial judgments about salience are totally wrong. I think the psychology of boredom is actually a potentially enthralling topic. It's the sort of photo negative of the question what are the sorts of experiences that people find most effortlessly absorbing and why? And what could be more fascinating than discovering the hidden principles underlying fascination itself.
It's a good point, and understanding boredom is a really important part of that picture. Also, I would argue against the intuition that boredom is like a trivial subject or something that is not of much societal impact. I think boredom has huge social consequences, and I want to mention a couple of ways. Of course, it's true that boredom has huge consequences in education, where as both of these studies note boredom in the classroom is associated with a
range of negative outcomes studies in the past. They go over a bunch of these papers in their background sections. They say, studies in the past have found that being bored in class is associated with quote lower dedication to learning, lower effort, lower learning motivation, poorer time management, more attention problems, and lower class attendance. Extensive evidence has demonstrated a negative impact of boredom on academic performance, and they cite a
bunch of studies and to back this up. The evidence is pretty clear being bored in class is not only unpleasant for the student, it is not good for educational outcomes. But also I think the subject of boredom has broader consequences.
For example, this is not something that these researchers discuss at all, but I am personally of the opinion that one of the most poisonous trends brought on by media technologies like TV and the Internet and social media is the rise of what I would call an entertainment based epistemology, a tendency to believe things are true and important simply because they hold your interest because they're entertaining or interesting, and to assume things are either false or important if
they bore you. I can't prove this is true, but I strongly believe this, and I think this helps explain a lot of otherwise confounding social phenomena. For example, I think I've mentioned this exact idea on the podcast before, but I think there is a really underappreciated explanation for the mass appeal of conspiracy theories, and that is that
they are entertaining. A lot of the popular explanations for the appeal of conspiracy theories is based in anxieties and the need for explanatory closure on ambiguous phenomena, and you know, the search for explanations and all that, and I'm sure those play play a role too, but I personally think entertainment is like a huge and under explored factor in what makes these things so popular. A lot of conspiracy theories offer a fascinating, absorbing, Hollywood style narrative to explain
something in the world, world, something that is interesting. It effortlessly holds your attention, when like a more parsimonious explanation based on evidence would be kind of boring.
Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. It's so many of the like even if you don't get in, even if you are not a conspiracy theorist, if you would not say that you're a you know, if you don't follow the boards, you don't actually believe in any of it. You or they'll say you don't believe in
the various theories and what have you. You can you still probably find them amusing on some level, at least on that Can you believe what these people believe the level of things you know, or just look at look at this you know this data, then look how they're interpreting it. And of course that can, as we've discussed before, like that can also be kind of a gateway into learning more about it and maybe being overwhelmed by some of the ideas.
I think that's exactly right, and I think it's also it's more than just what we would call strictly conspiracy theories. I think there are generally a lot of people who just get into highly speculative, highly speculative belief systems with a poor basis and evidence, let's call it that. Starting off just like being kind of like, what's this, I'll
watch a video. Oh, this is kind of entertaining. But as you spend time with ideas, even if you don't initially believe them, often they will come to become more appealing to you because you're spending time with them. Almost kind of a social reinforcement effect sets in the same way that when you spend time around people, their beliefs start seeming more reasonable to you.
Yeah. And also, as we've said before, a lot of these ideas provide kind of a shortcut to wonder, a shortcut to individual or cosmic significance. You know, places you can get to through science through a you know, actual understanding of of of evolution or or or you know or or the you know, the history of the universe as we understand it. But aliens, however, often provide a short cut to that point.
Yes, a short cut to explanatory closure, and one that is just it just holds your attention easily, Like, you don't have to put in much work to keep thinking about it. It's just fascinating.
Yeah.
Anyway, So if we are to an extent correct about that belief about the you know, the pandemic of entertainment based epistemology thinking something's true just because it's it's interesting or exciting, then it's incredibly meaningful to all of us to have a better understanding of how human interest is cultivated and also how boredom sets in. Though even if we're wrong about the societal trend, it's still a really
important question for educators and other communication based professions. Boredom, by any measure, I think is a really serious object of study.
Yeah, and you know, as a as a parent, I guess a topic that comes up again and again, and my wife and I frequently have discussions about, like, do do the youth of today understand how to be bored? Do they know what boredom is? You know, they're like they have so many different streams of entertainment and information
coming into their lives. And then also like, I think you need tools to deal with boredom and and or transform your boredom because there are going to be times in your life where you're going to be bored and you're going to have to be able to defind ways out of it or through it yourself.
Okay, So to look at these actual studies themselves. The first study was called Boredom Begets Boredom and Experienced Sampling Study on the Impact of Teacher Boredom on Student Boredom and Motivation, published in the British Journal of Educational Psychology
in twenty twenty. The subjects were four hundred and thirty seven students mean age fourteen and a half years and seventeen of their teachers, and the study set out to determine quote, the relationship between teacher boredom, students perceived teacher boredom, student boredom, and student learning motivation and rob This is
one where I can identify from personal experience. I have had the experience of being a teacher and being bored by what I was teaching, but trying not to let the students know that, having to kind of like fake it to like push through and okay, no, no, no, because they'll they'll know if you're bored. I had a sense of it back then. They'll know if you're bored and so you got to really like put on a happy face and get into it even if you're not feeling it.
Yeah, because I think on one level or another, we at least know the Hollywood version of what a bored teacher looks like. We think of, say Ben Stein in Ferris Beeler's Day Off, or any other various pop culture manifestations of the same principle, like, this boring individual is bored, and I am also feeling the boredom that is just flowing off of them in waves.
So the researchers collected a two week experience diary from the subjects that included experiences in classroom lectures, and the findings were indeed that teacher boredom was negatively associated with student motivation. Bored teachers made students less motivated, and they write about their conclusions, quote perceiving teachers being bored promoted students own feeling of boredom, which in turn reduced their
learning motivation. They say, quote when a teacher is bored in class, or when students perceive that their teacher is bored. So maybe if it seems like they're bored even though they're not, students would have lower learning motivation. Makes sense, okay. Second study this was called whatever will Will bore? The
mere anticipation of boredom exacerbates its occurrence in lectures. This was also published in the British Journal of Educational Psychology twenty twenty three, and this paper included three studies attempting to measure whether expecting to be bored by an experience
makes you more likely to actually be bored by it. So, in the first couple of studies, they used natural university lecture environments, so just like students going to their own classes, and they asked students ahead of time, and they found that students who expected to be bored in a lecture later did report that it was more boring than students
who didn't expect to be bored. But you could say, okay, well, but maybe that's some there's some other confounding factor there, like maybe if you're if you were the kind of student who expects to be bored, you're also just more
likely to be bored in general. So in a third study, they experimentally manipulated anticipated boredom, so they were going to show students a lecture video and they had a test group where they made students more likely to expect boredom, and they found yes, in this manipulated sample group, they did. The students who did anticipate higher levels of boredom felt more bored by the video lecture.
Yeah. I think this is an important area because I hear from my son regarding his class. It's like their classes he loves, and then the classes where he expects to be bored And I haven't approached it from this angle before, Like I need to talk to him about
like expectations of boredom equally boredom. But also it makes me think about like the social pressure of thinking a class is boring and the effect that would have, you know, like it seems, you know, this pervasive idea that I think is often compounded by media, the idea that ah Man school school sucks, teachers suck, the you know, classes are boring. It's just something you got to get through so you can get back to tears from the kingdom
or whatever, so tears off the Kingdom. Sorry sorry sell defense, but at any rate, Yeah, like understanding and being able to sort of be aware of yourself within a bored state seems important.
Yeah. Yeah, So I've got a couple of points I want to make First of all, I want to say we say this a lot, but to anybody reacting to these studies with like, well I could have told you that, or like why do they have to test that? That's obvious? Science is full of findings that are counterintuitive, where your hunches are wrong. You will never discover those unless you check. So until you actually put your hunches to the test,
you don't really know. So I would just always encourage people don't react that way when a study finds something and you feel like, well, that's obvious, why would you test for that? Yeah, but there are tons of things that are true that are not obvious, so like you should check anyway, put things to the test. Even if it seems like, yeah, obviously that's true, a lot of times it's not true.
Yeah, And if it is true, you want to know how true it is. I mean, kind of going back to the nose hairs thing, like, yeah, even though we suspect that this is the case, it makes sense to test it more, to do counts, to look at medical histories of individuals with and without nose hair and see how it all lines up.
So that's the first point. But the second thing is coming back to your idea. Yeah, about about like your son's expectations of boredom in certain classes in school, and all that this second paper was to me. It was suggesting interesting questions about the role of volition in boredom. For example, I have memories of when I was a kid, I would go to church, and I remember thinking that
church was boring. It would feel like it was going on forever, and I would want it to be over so we could leave and I could have lunch or whatever. I also remember feeling bad for feeling this way. I remember feeling guilty that I was having these sacrilegious thoughts or emotional reactions, and that it was basically immoral of me to be bored by church. You know, we're coming here to worship the creator of the universe. Shouldn't this be the most interesting thing we ever do in our
whole lives? And so I can remember making conscious effort to convince myself that church was not going to be boring. It was going to be really really interesting, and I was going to feel really really interested by it. And I was trying to think, like, I don't really fully know the answer to this question. I was thinking, did those efforts work. I remember thinking like that, But did
that actually make me less bored? I think it sort of worked, like I think I could partially talk myself into being less bored by an experience I found naturally boring, but there was still some kind of cognitive dissonance there. And I don't know if that actually made the underlying boredom more or more bearable or less bearable in some way. I don't know.
Hmmm, this is interesting. Now. My apologies to my mother if she's listening, but I would agree that church is boring. I have most of my memories of going to church as a child were of being bored. I think, you know, I mean, I think part of it is like you know what, age is the material aimed at you know, in the you know what and so forth, And as an adult, you're you're often maybe more, there's more in
the like the sermon that is aimed at you. As an adult, you you kind of have a built up appreciation for the music you're singing in the church culture you're in the in the middle of. But also I look back and I remember, like three things come to mind. First of all, you learned how to deal with your own boredom, and if you were bored, you you know, you fostered some sort of imagination and and so you know, I would sort of go into daydreamland if if I
wasn't engaged with what was going on. But I also remember that the other side of it is like generally there's a Bible there that you can use, right next to the hymnal, and so I would often pick that up because it's like it's okay, most books you can't have out during the sermon, but you can have a Bible out, and there's all sorts of weird stuff going
on in that Bible. So oh yeah, if you're not you know, if you're not checked in on that sermon, well you can go see what sort of strange war or magical scenario is happening in the Old Testament, you know, flip around, see what see what happens. Uh.
This may be more my adult perspective than my perspective at the time, but I totally agree church may have been boring, but the Bible is not. The Bible is awesome.
So yeah, I mean, even in churches today, I think it's it's still a challenge, like how do you can you can take kids out of those those sermons. Uh, And you can take and send them to a kid's church, but then eventually there's a cut off point where they're
in there with everyone else. And uh. And I'm you know, talking mainly from a you know, a Protestant background here, but I imagine this is true of so many religions that eventually there is going to be a worship service that is aimed at the community at large, and younger people are just not going to be into it as much. And how do you keep them engaged? Yeah? How do you? How do you deal with that challenge? So I'm sure a lot I'm sure a lot of people we've given
this a lot of thought throughout history. But but yeah, it's it's, it's, it's. It seems seems like it's probably a universal conundrum because you can't just make the church service exciting for the for the young people, because then are the older people going to be into it? I guess you end up having two services. I know that's something with a lot of places do.
Yeah, I don't know how I would feel now with my adult perspective, though I do remember I think there is a some not quite the same way, because there wasn't like a you know, a threat of supernatural authority
hanging over it. But I think I can recall also to a lesser extent, similar things in like some college classes, where I would be like sometimes feeling truthfully a little bit bored in say one of my literature classes, but also being like, but the person I want to be is somebody who who cares about books and finds these books interesting and you know, and a lot of my literature classes were effortlessly fascinating, but other ones were sometimes honestly more of a slog And so I remember I've
probably had some of that same cognitive dissonance there. I'm like, I want to fight my way into finding this more interesting than I naturally do.
Yeah, yeah, I know this feeling as well. And while your mortal soul may not be on the line, there's still was and is a lot on the line in a college class, Like I remember thinking like, no, no, no, I should like find a reason to be engaged with this, because you're going to have to write an essay or there's going to be a test or what have you. But then it's still like you're coming up against the feeling of boredom, and there's at times it can feel insurmountable.
But anyway, to come back to the subject of the study, I do think that there is I don't know if it can get you all the way there, but I do think there is a partial role of like just willful, volitional commitment to the idea that I am not going to be bored by the subject matter actually contributing to somewhat lessening it's boredom.
Yeah, yeah, And I think that's a skill that has to be learned and taught, you know. I mean, you have to be able to put yourself in that place where it's like, Okay, I am bored now, but let's turn things on. Let's find something to not be bored about. What's something I can engage with this, you know, religious service, with this lecture, or anything else for that matter.
To wrap this section, I did just want to feature a poem. This is by the poet Charles Simmitch. It was published in The New Yorker in two thousand and seven. It's called to Boredom. It's a poem about boredom. It reads, I'm the child of your rainy Sundays. I watched time crawl over the ceiling like a wounded fly. A day would last forever, making pellets of bread, waiting for a branch on a bare tree to move. The silence would deepen, the sky would darken, as grandmother knitted with a ball
of black yarn. I know heavens like that. In Eternity's classrooms, the angel sit like bored children with their heads bowed.
Oh that's nice. I'd not heard or read this one before.
It struck me as a good intersection of our subject matter because it includes the idea of children being bored in classrooms, but also of the sort of shameful boredom of piety.
Yes. Yeah, And it's also ironic because I have it on good authority that poetry is also boring or so or so the children seem to think. And I immediately question this tho It's like, how can you guys not be into poetry? Like poetry covers a lottery. I think maybe is you're exposed to poetry in classrooms, you're only exposed to like a thin idea of what poetry is, and without a reminder that poetry also spills over into literature at large, and also into the lyrics of every song you listen to.
Well. This actually comes back to the idea of whether the teacher enthusiasm or teacher boredom coming through and affecting the students in the class. I strongly believe that if a child thinks poetry is boring, boring and they haven't found a way to get into it, one way to break through to them is to is to experience poetry read aloud by a really good, entertaining reader, experiencing it as an outloud verbal sort of performance instead of just
something on the page. I think that really helps, like show what's exciting about it?
Oh, yes, absolutely, all right, it's time for our last selection here though though again we're not covering all of the winners. We encourage you to go check out in Probable dot com and see the full list. But it is now time to taste the Ramen electric.
What are you about to do to me?
Rob? So? This is the Nutrition prize. This one comes from the article Augmented Gustation using Electricity by Nakamura and Nyashita. This is from Proceedings of the second Augmented Human International Conference, March twenty eleven. This is a really fun one. I had a lot of fun with this paper. I expect that it would be at least a little kooky, because just the idea of essentially eating food that is electrified, that has an electrical current flowing through it, that alone
sounds completely bonkers. So I was all up for it. But then, oh my goodness, this paper kicks off as if it were written by the mad scientist doctor Kurt Leopold from the nineteen seventy one horror movie Zat aka The Blood Waters of Doctor z. This is a film that was riffed on Mystery Science Theater three thousand back in the day, and we have covered it on Weird House Cinema. It is a Florida mad scientist movie with a fishman, a catfish man walking around, but.
A self induced catfish man, right, like he's not made that way by you know, nuclear testing or something. He decides to become a fishman.
That's right. Basically, he's like fish rule humans, drool. I'm gonna turn myself into the ultimate fish man, and then I'm going to turn all of the fish into superfish, and fish are gonna rule the world again, and I will be like their fish king. Hilariously, it doesn't really pan out for doctor Leopold in the film, but he has some great narration early on in that film. So I'm gonna read the opening paragraph from this paper in my version of the Curt Leopold voice.
Okay, please quote.
Catfish are described as swimming tongues because they have taste buds covering their external body surface and oropheryngegal cavity, and they can recognize a very large number of tastes with high sensitivity. In contrast, human taste buds are located only in the mouth and their sensitivity is lower. Posting human beings can augment their sensitivity and the number of tastes that they can perceive. In this paper, we propose a method to change taste. The method involves the provision of
electric stimulus. We discuss the use of various sensors to augment gustation.
And the Oscar goes to you, brilliant, and you're right, it is this is so, this is so, doctor Leopald. It's like when he's talking about uh oh, what is he talking about, like the sargassum or something. We the weed of deceit, but just the contempt for humanity here weak pathetic human taste buds.
Yeah, yeah, so this is one of the more exciting opening paragraphs in a science study that I've read recently. So to refresh, catfish are amazing because they're all tongue tasting all the time. Humans, on the other hand, can only taste with their mouths and have disappointingly low sensitivity to taste losing. However, we humans have science so we can augment our tasting powers.
This feels like some kind of pitch from like a scammer catfish life coach. It was like, using my course, you can become as cool as a catfish like me.
It totally does so. First of all, the first two points here are very true. Catfish are often described as supertasters with taste receptors all over their bodies, though the receptors are more concentrated on the mouth and the barbels or whiskers of the catfish. They have a colossal number of taste receptors and high sensitivity to amino acids. They use these amazing senses to detect dissolved proteins from food sources in the muck, as well as finding potential mates.
A reminder that catfish, if you're not familiar with them, if you're not a you know, if you don't fish for catfish. They live in the muck there. They're bottom dwellers. They're highly sensitive to things that may be down there, decaying in the mud that they can feast upon.
Okay, so I guess when you are I don't know if the word would be scavenger. When this is your method of getting nutrition, you need a you need a highly tuned sensory array to figure out where the nutrition is amongst all of the goop exactly.
Yeah, So to put some numbers behind this, I was looking at a Live Science article by Remy Malina published in twenty eleven. This author points out that the average person has about ten thousand taste buds, but catfish, on the other hand, can have get ready for it, one hundred thousand to one hundred and seventy five thousand taste buds taste receptors. The article also points out that chickens come in really with twenty four taste receptors.
To them, everything tastes like themselves.
But think about that without doing the exact math, so you know, feel free to check my math here, But essentially, I think you could roughly say that catfish are as far beyond humans as humans are beyond chickens in terms of our like the taste realm of the senses that we occupy in the world.
I see. So, Like, if you could imagine catfish becoming like humans and having a complex catfish society, what glories and splendors of gustation and food senses would would they create? Just imagine their restaurants.
Exactly exactly so like another way to think about this. For instance, there are tastes that chickens can't taste that humans can taste. We know this to be the case with other animals as well, like the domestic cat. Domestic cat can't taste sweet things. On the other hand, domestic cats can taste at least one thing that we cannot taste, and that is adnisine triphosphate or ATP. This is an energetic molecule in meat, while apparently humans cannot taste it.
According to David Blo's two thousand and seven Scientific American articles, strange but true cats cannot taste sweets.
And again, this would make sense from an adaptive point of view. Cats are not evolved to say, select fruits or things like that from their environment. Their carnivores. You know, they're going to be primarily eating the meat of other animals.
Yeah, so a cat. It makes sense that a cat cannot appreciate, say, a fresh peach, the way human can, or at all for that matter. Meanwhile, even though humans do buy and large eat meat, or they can eat meat depending on their individual diets, you know, they certainly can appreciate the flavors of meat, but not in the way that cats do. Obligate. Carnivores, little carnivores that they are, they taste meats in ways that we cannot. And if you live with a cat like I do this, you
can appreciate this. Like, yes, they seem to have a relationship with their food dish that is different than our relationship with our food dishes, you know. But the catfish, the catfish, oh man, it's almost I think it's insufficient to say that the catfish can taste rotting organic matter and in the muck in ways that we cannot, because I think it's like that number is so much larger
than ours. The full taste of bud count They inhabit an entirely different sense realm when it comes to taste itself, and especially when it comes to the precious muck meat.
They are in a cinnabite level of sensory experience. When it comes to tasting the mud at the bottom of the river, the pleasure and pain indivisible.
Yeah. Like to reference another MST three K movie, if you could dopple into the body of a catfish and experience life as a catfish and your mud is the catfish, Like, what would that be like? Would it just be just I'm imagining, like catfish experiencing muck meat would be like the Stargate sequence from two thousand and one A Space Odyssey, You know, That's what it would be like to just really dig into some fresh rotten meat from the muck.
Yeah, experience beyond limits.
Yeah, So what's a human to do short of transforming themselves into a walking catfish person. Well, as we've discussed on the show before, humans do have one leg up on the scenario, and that is that we have cooking. We have built up multiple culinary cultures that have long fed into each other. We've eaten the rainbow and then some figuring out how to augment, mask, enhance, and change flavors to maximize our gustation.
Right, So, we know that cooking food changes its nutritional profile, but also cooking food unlocks new levels of taste experience. A big part of what people do when they say cook a piece of meat, is they brown it, you know, call using the Miard reaction of these proteins, which like drastically increases the complexity of flavor available on the on the surface of the meat.
Yeah, so the catfish is left of the mercy of the environment. Humans. However, we have fewer peg pigments at our disposal to paint with. But boy, can we paint
with them. You know, we can fine tune them, make the absolute best out of so many ingredients, and you know, concluding not only staples to our diet, but also minuscule amounts of say, poisons and plant bioweapons, things that aren't really on the menu from like a larger, you know, sort of evolutionary standpoint, but we figured out how to use them in just the right ways and just the right amounts to fine tune the main things that we're consuming.
And the authors of the award winning paper here also point out that not everything we use is even a food or a plant byproduct. Carbonated drinks, They point out depends on carbon dioxide. It's not something that has any kind of like nutrition profile, you know, but it's still something that enhances our our gustation, that enhances our consumption and appreciation of a given beverage.
I do love a Seltzer water.
Yeah. And then central to the paper here is the idea of electric taste, depending on the observation that humans perceive electric stimulus as having a sour or metallic taste. Now, the authors point this out. I don't know that I don't think we've covered this before. Maybe I'm wrong, because we certainly talked about the history of electrical invention and research. But they point out that we've known about this at
least since the early days of electricity. Swiss math professor and electrical pioneer Johann Georg Sulzer, who lives seventeen twenty through seventeen seventy nine, was apparently the first person to write about this and perhaps the first person to experience
electric gustation in seventeen fifty two. As Neville Monroe Hopkins pointed out in a nineteen oh five book Experimental Electrochemistry, Sulcer reported quote, if you joined two pieces of lead and silver, so that they will be in the same plane, and then lay them upon the tongue, you will notice a certain taste resembling that of green vitriol, and while each piece apart produces no such sensation.
Oh that's interesting. So maybe the idea would be that you're tasting electrical current.
Yeah. Yeah, And the authors here point out that this quote triggered the discovery of the battery cell by Volta. And also we should add, going back to our previous episode, is that we have another example of scientists using their sense of taste to explore the world.
Oh great connection. Going back to the twenty twenty three ig Nobel Geology Prize, which was about eating and licking rocks and fossils in various ways, But one of the things discussed in that essay was about how geologists will sometimes and especially further back in history, would taste rocks and sediments and stuff in order to get some chemical information about them.
Right right. So the authors here again are mostly concerned with ways to sort of expand human taste sensations, and so they point out that there are various beyond cooking approaches to flavor augmentation that have been proposed already including I'm going to list some of these overlaying novel sense
and augmented reality information with the consumption of traditional food. So, for instance, imagine you're eating a chocolate chip cookie while at the same time new car smell is piped in at you, and while augmented augmented reality headset makes it seem like you're snacking on I don't know, a slice of rainbow or a Pikachu or something.
Okay, yeah, so you're combining things. You would have some kind of actual physical chemical substrate that is the thing that's literally going into your mouth while you're eating, but you're having that a sort of modified in virtual reality sense by different by like visual information coming in through a headset or goggles or something that make it look like something else, and you're being given different smells than this food would normally have. And a big part of
what we think of as taste is actually smell. This is apparent to anybody who's ever had like a bad cold or something suddenly like you can't taste food anymore. A lot of what you when you're eating food and you think this tastes so good. A huge part of that experience is actually it's smelling good. It just feels like it's taste.
Yeah, I mean it reminds me of one of the aspects of mixology is that take mint for example. Is there plenty of great cocktails and zero proof cocktails that have nnt inside them that you know, perhaps the mint is torn up or mold or what have you. But on the other hand, there are plenty of say tropical drinks, for example, that have mint only as a garnish, and maybe that mint is pounded in the palm or it's you know, ripped a little bit before it's added on top.
Maybe not, but that's an example where you're not actually drinking the mint, but your face is close to the mint garnish whilst consuming the beverage, and therefore the mint is contributing to the overall taste profile of the cocktail.
Yeah, molecules of the mint may not be going into your mouth and getting on your tongue, but because you're smelling it, it does affect how the drink quote tastes, really by affecting how it smells exactly.
And so they're saying, well, you could do that in perhaps more technological ways, and then this augmented reality level. The sort of Pokemon Go level of it is, make it actually look like something else as well.
All right.
Another approach they highlight is using vibration and sound to change the experience of tasting a candy. I like that one because it sounds like something Willy Wonka would dream up.
Mm hmmm.
They also mentioned more or less in passing. This is something that I think would have to be explored in greater depth is the idea of mind control three D printing that translates brain signals from the user into three D printed food. I glanced at a twenty nineteen paper on this concept. So it's kind of like think it, print it, eat it.
Anything you can dream up, you like, neural link your brain.
To a three D printer, yeah, or just kind of you know, you're sort of you're really hungry, and you're sort of you know, you're fantasizing about the food you want to eat, and then yes, let that flow into the three D printer and it will print that food out of soil and green or something.
I don't know about that one.
I also, this is outside of what they were talking about. I looked at a study that proposed to propose a kind of neural sharing of taste sensations. One quote from it. This is from Electric Taste by Chiak and car Niyaka from twenty eighteen. Quote. Humans will want to share these stimuli collectively as an experienced digitally, like they currently do with visual and audio media on the Internet.
Oh okay, so the same way you share a meme or something, you can share a flavor.
I guess so. But then, like, what is it like to be rickrolled in the realm of shared online taste experiences? I don't know. I don't want to know. Circus peanuts. I think circus peanuts is the rickrolling of a flavor that's brilliant.
That's exactly right. You mean that the weird the puffy candy yes, a yeah, the peanuts, yes.
No, actual peanuts are great, obviously, but that's the weird circus peanuts.
In the same vein candy corn, you know, like you think it's going to be one thing, but it's candy corn. You've got candy corn again.
Finally, we're going to get to electric food and drink, like the basic concept. So the first concept that they roll out is the idea of drinking electrically charged liquids. And for this you'll need to drink out of two straws at once and also like two contains or at least two compartments in the same container. I'm going to read a quote here that explains how this works, and I'm not going to use the funny voice this time, okay. Quote. To set up the system, the user pours a drink
containing an electrolyte into two cups, Cups A and cup BE. Next, they insert a negative electrode into a straw and put the straw in Cup A. In a similar manner, the user inserts a positive electrode into other straw into the other straw and puts that straw in cup B. Is shown in figure one, which obviously if you're listening to this you can't see. But the circuit of this system is completed when the user drinks. An electric contact is
connected between the straw in the mouth. While drinking, the tongue picks up the electrical stimulus and perceives electric taste.
Okay, Well, I think I understand the technical system they're describing, but I'm wondering more about the sensation, like what does this taste like?
Well, from what I understand. And I should also add that in the image they present here, you see this cup presumably with two compartments, and there's like a little knob on the cup where you can control the voltage, so you can sort of adjust the exit, you know, to what extent you're gonna perceive the electric taste in various beverages. So my understanding is, like you have the beverage or beverages that you are drinking through the straws.
Those have electrolytes. Those also have their own flavor profile, and then they're combining with the electric taste that the tongue perceives. So that kind of metallic or sour.
Taste, okay, so just be another kind of flavor that you can like turn up or down in your drink with a switch.
Yeah, So kind of like that mint garnish on that cocktail, except an electrical current through the tongue, you know.
Okay.
Now for food, they realize where you're gonna need something else, and so they propose electric chopsticks. They work on a similar basis, with the chopsticks serving as negative and positive electrodes for the morsel of food pinch between them that is being brought to the tongue. We should also mention, just in passing, we did a great invention episode many not many, a couple of years ago, I don't know,
some number of years ago about chopsticks. Chopsticks on their own are fascinating, even if they are not electrified.
Chopsticks are always one of the first things I think about when considering the ways that the experience of eating food is highly influenced by things other than just like the flavor and texture of the food itself. Like, eating with chopsticks changes the food experience in a way that I very much like, Like, I will enjoy the same food more often if I eat it with chopsticks.
Yeah, I almost never use a fourth these days. I use chopsticks instead.
Oh well, I'm not quite there yet for certain foods. Yeah, I don't know. It just feels good. I don't know what the difference is.
Yeah, I mean I also use a fork. There's sometimes sometimes you just need a form fair enough. But anyway, I should drive home here that the idea, as I understand it here again, is not that the electricity is changing the flavor of the food morsel. It is when the when your tongue touches the food morsel, and you know,
the circuit is completed through the tongue. That is where this additional flavor profile is is introduced into the taste sensation of the meat or whatever the morsel happens to be, right, Okay, So I think at this point you might be forgiven if you still think this sounds completely ridiculous, like something that would be rolled out in a movie. That's you know,
at a you know, a really fancy experimental restaurant. You know, like, here's your dry ice cocktail, and here your electric chopsticks to uh to eat your electric morsels with.
Yeah, what is this minority report food?
Yeah? Yeah, And I think I think that would be a pretty fun place to leave it. But things in this paper get even weirder and futuristic, because remember the paper starts out by talking about ways to not only enhance human flavor, but to kind of take us to the next level. And they argue that electric gustation could essentially open the gateway to new realms of flavor. They write, quote, today,
most gustatory information tends to focus on the enjoyment of eating. However, the primary role of gustatory information is to use chemical signals to determine whether we can eat a particular material. However, we cannot identify all materials and do not have the capability to distinguish between materials that differ slightly in terms of their ingredients. By using certain sensors and the information on electric tastes provided by them, we may succeed in
increasing the sensitivity of the organ of taste. In other words, we can augment the sense of taste by using the phenomenon of electric taste and sensors. So if I'm understanding this correctly, the potential ramifications of this direction are twofold. They argue that we could simply enhance our taste and we be able to potentially tell the difference between two very similarly tasting dishes that have different ingredients, kind of
like a taste of all the ingredients. Sort of approach taste every ingredient that's in there, even the ones that you normally wouldn't sense, like looking at a painting with better glasses so you can see all the details. But then the other level is previously tasteless material now has taste. New things are on the menu.
I don't know if this would ever actually work but just going with the hypothetical here that this would work, you could imagine it being useful in the sense of, say, imagine somebody has a very strong food allergy. Uh, and it's for a food item that sometimes gets you know, mixed in undetected with other ingredients in a dish, maybe something. So you could just start eating a dish without realizing that this allergen is in there and then have a
bad reaction. But if you had this special you know, taste all the ingredient sensor, you'd put it in your mouth and then you would immediately know, uh, oh, this has my allergen in it. I should not eat it.
Yeah, that seems reasonable. That seems in align with the kind of thing they're thinking about here. I'm going to read one last quote. They say, by providing a particular electric taste pattern to previously tasteless material, we can ensure the material can be perceived. For example, by replacing atmospheric CO two concentration with electric taste, humans may be able to discern the taste of exhaled and inhaled air. This is similar to the concept of seeing infrared light via
an infrared camera. The goal of our system is to obtain a new layer of tongue that can detect tastes that we could not perceive previously. So new frontiers in flavor. The city limits of Flavor Town can be pushed out into the previously rural environments.
This is ambitious. I'd say this is beyond expanding the city limits. This is Alexander the Great, and this is a conquest of taste.
Yes, yes, there's a whole world of flavors out there that we are denying ourselves. So yeah, this one's inherently funny because it's talking about electrified food, something that I don't think anybody really wants, or at least didn't until they read this paper. But it's also important because you know, nobody wants it because the windows of perception are closed to us. As comical as aspects of the article may seem, like, the basic premise here is I mean, it's utterly psychedelic.
Like if we were talking about something other than taste, like more people would be instantly on board. Like if we were talking just about site For us humans who are very site based, if you said, well, these goggles allow you to see things that were previously unseen, you'd be like yes, I will buy that out of the back of a comic book from the nineteen sixties, so that this is, you know, ultimately a similar scenario.
It's not X ray glasses, it's the X ray tongue exactly. All right, are we going to cap our Ignobel series there?
I believe we will. We'll go ahead and close up shop until next year when they honor more fascinating studies and will inevitably cover them then as well. In the meantime, will remind you that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a science podcast with core episodes on two, season three, and Mondays we do listener mail. On Wednesdays we do a short form monster fact or artifact episode, and on Fridays we set aside most series concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
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