The Morning File / 2011 Ig Nobel wisdom: Go before you leave
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Sigh language: Karl Halvor Teigen of University of Olso took home an Ig Nobel for research on why people sigh.
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What a great time of year early fall is: The annual guessing game over how impaired a concussion will render a Pittsburgh athlete; the smack of cold rain against the gutters and skin; the awarding of the Ig Nobel prizes, for things like studying how much the need to pee affects our decision-making.
Actually, we rather like the Ig Nobels, so much that we do our best each year to make sure everyone is aware of them, not just science nerds with a sense of humor. The tongue-in-cheek ceremony has been held in Cambridge, Mass., for two decades by the Annals of Improbable Research to honor real-life research that either sounds -- or often is -- ridiculous. It's an alternative to the upcoming, snootier Nobel prizes.
So last week some of the "honorees" showed up to accept their 2011 prizes, while kept to a rigorous minute-long acceptance speech limit (enforced by an 8-year-old girl) at a ceremony that also featured the annual Win-a-Date-With-a-Nobel-Laureate contest and showering of the stage with paper airplanes.
The urination researchers, from prestigious universities in the U.S. and abroad, were among those attending after winning the Ig Nobel prize in medicine. They had produced serious, published papers titled "Inhibitory Spillover: Increased Urination Urgency Facilitates Impulse Control in Unrelated Domains" and "The Effect of Acute Increase in Urge to Void on Cognitive Function in Healthy Adults."
One of the researchers, Brown University's Peter Snyder, explained to The Associated Press that their study determined that driving with a full bladder had the same effect in impairing motorists as low-level intoxication or substantial sleep deprivation.
"When people reach a point when they are in so much pain they just can't stand it anymore, it was like being drunk," he said. "The ability to hold information was really impaired."
Another important finding led to this year's Ig Nobel chemistry prize. Japanese researchers identified the ideal density of airborne wasabi (note to non-sushi eaters: it's pungent, fiery horseradish) that could be used to awaken sleeping people during emergency, as an alternative to noise or lights. The winners were serious enough about their finding to have filed a patent for it.
Karl Halvor Teigen of the University of Oslo attended the ceremony to collect the psychology prize for his work to understand sighing. Yes, sighing. He and his students figured out that while people tend to think sighing is about sadness, it's really about throwing up your hands and giving up on something. They gave people difficult puzzles to solve, and the result was sighs aplenty.
First Published October 3, 2011 12:00 am
