The 2025 Ig Nobels, Part 1

The Ig Nobel Prizes once more honor ten studies that make us laugh, but then make us think. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe continue their annual tradition of discussing some of their favorites from this year’s winners.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey you welcome to each Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
And it's that time of year again. The exact time
of year again has shifts for us anyway. Sometimes it's
late September, other times it's early November. But this is
generally the window in which we aim to discuss the
latest winners of the Ignobel Prizes, the ig Nobels. For

(00:38):
anyone who has forgotten, or maybe you're new to the show,
you don't know what I'm talking about. It's a series
of awards given out once a year by a scientific
humor journal called the Annals of Improbable Research, edited for
many years now by Mark Abraham's. The publication's stated purpose
is to quote honor achievements that first make people laugh
and then make them think. You can learn much more

(01:00):
about them at improbable dot com. They have a wonderful
list where you can just you can scroll through all
the winners over the years, different peer reviewed papers, scientific papers,
and sometimes just individual researchers that are singled out for
these different studies that are in one way or another

(01:21):
comedic and hilarious, but also deep down our legitimate science
that it is often answering very important questions or things
on the borders of very important questions, things that are
still part of the ever growing expanse of scientific curiosity.

Speaker 3 (01:37):
Yeah, I would say usually are legitimate science. Occasionally something
will get highlighted that is itself intended to be satirical.
But I almost think of that as kind of like
remember in the days of America's Funniest Tone videos, when
there would be the occasional video that was funny on purpose.
I never liked that. Even as a kid. I would

(02:00):
watch that be like, uhh, that's not acceptable. You can
only this has to be an accident or it doesn't work.

Speaker 2 (02:06):
I remember watching America's Funniest to videos with a skeptical
eye too, and thinking that looks set up. Yea, they
intended for that sled to roll right into the house.
Clearly this was maybe the third or fourth take. I
can see the sled marks now. I kind of got
sidetracked there because I didn't intend for you to draw
the same conclusion about that, Like I hate the satirical

(02:30):
papers that get featured or something. I mean, the reology
of cats. One was funny, yeah when done right, but
it's perfect.

Speaker 3 (02:37):
Yeah right. But the point being that occasionally it is
something that is just supposed to be silly from the
get go. But most of what gets featured on the
Ignobels is just actual research of one kind or another
that people end up finding funny. Maybe it's because the
subject matter is farts or something. Maybe it's because the

(02:58):
the conclusion that the paper comes to seems blindingly obvious
or weirdly counterintuitive. I guess there are a lot of
different ways that a scientific paper can end up being funny.
But one thing I always really enjoy about doing these
episodes is that usually even when something seems really silly
at first glance, once you actually read into it, there's

(03:20):
kind of some interesting stuff going on underneath the hood.

Speaker 2 (03:23):
Yeah, absolutely, and I think that. I mean that's one
of the reasons we keep coming back to covering the
IGNO bells is, Yeah, it's genuinely laughter inducing, but once
you dig into them, there's something fascinating there, and it's
not always something that we would necessarily devote an entire
episode too. Though we should also note that sometimes the
honorees are very recent studies other times they may just

(03:45):
be decades old. So sometimes we'll get excited for the
Ignobells and we're like, oh, yeah, yeah, that's something we
covered that years ago.

Speaker 3 (03:50):
There is one paper this year about like a guy
who documented his own fingernails growing for decades and it
has been a while, but I know we covered that
on the show. Oh I think maybe we did an
episode about fingernails or something where we got into this.

Speaker 2 (04:04):
Yeah. Yeah, So they cast a wide net, both in
time and space. Yeah, And sometimes I think, you know,
you're talking about the different ways papers are funny. Sometimes
it's about the methodology alone. For instance, earlier that this
was not an Ignobel winner yet. But earlier this year
I chatted with Rusalind Dakin about hummingbirds and one and

(04:28):
then you know, hummingbirds perfectly natural thing to study, fascinating creatures.
But one of the studies they were doing with the
methodology that they employed, involved putting little necklaces around their necks,
and like, that is in and of itself hilarious. Right,
anytime we put little bits of clothing or something even
akin to clothing on an animal for scientific purposes, it's

(04:52):
going to cause us to giggle. On some level where
it's going to make me giggle. Anyway, serious scientists may disagree.

Speaker 3 (04:57):
Why did you make a diaper for category pillar as well?
It was for science?

Speaker 2 (05:01):
Yeah, exactly. So, as always, or as recently has been
the case, we are not going to discuss all the winners. Again,
go to improbable dot com if you want to go
through and explore all the different honorees this year, but
we are going to pick and choose a few and
we're going to discuss them over the course of a
couple of episodes this week.

Speaker 3 (05:21):
All right, well, Rob, I know you looked into this
year's Nutrition Prize. Do you want to start with that one?

Speaker 2 (05:28):
Yeah? Yeah, This this one was pretty fun. This was
probably the first one I selected. It went to a
paper by Danielle Deddy, Gabriel h. She Nagabeto, Roger Meek
and Luca Luisselli. And it is the title of the
paper published an African Journal of Ecology was Opportunistic foraging
Strategy of rainbow lizards at a seaside resort in Togo.

(05:52):
And the paper in question was a Nigerian, Togalese, Italian
French production and was awarded quote for studying the extent
to which a certain kind of lizard chooses to eat
certain kinds of pizza, and it published in twenty twenty three.

Speaker 3 (06:07):
I feel like this is a big step up in
the world of pizza. Rat pizza, pigeon, pizza. Lizard is
just the next place it had to go.

Speaker 2 (06:17):
Right, right, It's obvious why this one. Any non human
animal eating pizza is just inherently funny, And I don't know,
it's hard to really describe why this is the case.
I mean, the word pizza itself can be funny given
certain contexts, and on top of that, I don't know,
there's something just very comedic about a slice of pizza.

(06:40):
I don't know. I don't know if it's if it's
inherent to the slice of pizza, or is it just
the way that we often use the slice of pizza
right pizza.

Speaker 3 (06:49):
I think it's because pizza is very far from a
food found in nature. If a bird comes and plucks
a grape off of your plate, that's not that funny.
It's a little bit funny. If it comes and plucks
a French fry off your plate, that's funnier than a grape,
because the bird in nature would never encounter a fried

(07:11):
piece of potato, but it's still basically just a piece
of potato. Something has happened to it. A pizza is
a whole production. You have made a dough, you have
made a sauce, you have you know, you have created
cheese out of milk and probably added some other things
to it. It's all this stuff coming together and producing
this very synthetic, technological product. And the fact that an

(07:35):
animal is taking your pizza away. I think that's what's
funny about it.

Speaker 2 (07:38):
I think you're right. But yeah, plus the triangular slice
that especially screams unnatural, man made, but you know, pizza
rat doesn't care. Pizza rat is going to drag that
slice away for its own, its own consumption. So this study,
again that doesn't involve rats. It involves rainbow lizards a

(08:01):
gama agama, and in particular, we're dealing with rainbow lizards
in urban African environments, so in cities, in towns, or
very specific to this particular study, at beach resorts, and
so lizards eating pizzas. This is even more hilarious. You know,
we're clearly getting into teenage mutant into turtle territory. Here

(08:25):
brings to mind not only the pizza loving Turtles themselves,
but also fellow mutant Mondo Gecko. I don't know how
many episodes of the old cartoon Mondo Gecko actually factored
into I included an image of this particular character for
you here, Joe, obviously a half human, half lizard hybrid

(08:47):
with a lot of attitude.

Speaker 3 (08:49):
Oh man, So I was into the Turtles when I
was younger, But I don't know if I genuinely remember
this guy or not. I'm getting that tingling half memory
feeling right now, but it could be a false positive.

Speaker 2 (09:00):
Yeah. I did not have time to go back and
watch any of these episodes in full, but I did
notice that there is an episode titled Michelangelo Meets Mondo Gecko,
and one of the pizza's reference in the episode is
locks and cream cheese. Just a reminder i'd forgotten this,
but the teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon program frequently mentioned

(09:22):
gross sounding pizzas that the Turtles were ordering, or into,
or had consumed like the day before. See.

Speaker 3 (09:29):
I always thought of them as just getting your standard
pepperoni pizza or cheese pizza. That's what they show in
the ads for the show.

Speaker 2 (09:36):
Right, right, But no, they were ordering all sorts of
strange pizzas. And I did a short detour in my
research here, and I discovered a YouTuber somebody who goes
by the name of Kirk Cooks that's with a K,
and apparently on YouTube over the course of I don't know,
multiple episodes, maybe even years, this guy cooked all sixty

(10:02):
seven pizzas mentioned on the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle series,
So things like anchovies and butterscotch ice cream, pepperoni and marshmallow,
pickled herring, and caramel fudge, and of course locks and
cream cheese, which I just referenced.

Speaker 3 (10:17):
Clearly the most reasonable of all.

Speaker 2 (10:19):
The Yeah, I did check out that episode, and that
was that was what the host was said, like, this
one had the possibility to actually be pretty good, and
it seems like they were pleased with it.

Speaker 3 (10:32):
That's the most reasonable of the ones you mentioned, because
it's the only one that doesn't have candy on it.

Speaker 2 (10:36):
Yeah, a number of them had some sort of like
gross candy candy situation going on, And I did not
watch all of these reviews, but I can only assume
that the grosser ones were indeed gross, So I mean
that was part of the humor of the turtles being
into these strange pizza orders.

Speaker 3 (10:53):
Wait, Rob, do you personally I mean, hey, we don't
shame people for the foods they like here. You know,
a lot of strange sound foods are delicious. But Rob,
do you personally have like a standard pizza topping that
you can't stomach?

Speaker 2 (11:05):
Ooh? I mean, I mean there are things that are
not in my diet anymore, but in terms of toppings
that I just that I've historically had an issue with.
I think I was a little cranky about pineapple for
a while, but I think I had pineapple on a
pizza not too long ago, though to be clear, it

(11:26):
was not the sort of classic ham in pineapple combo,
and I think I ended up liking it. So I
suspect that my problem was not with pineapple on a
pizza but fruit meat combos. Okay, because there were other
like fruit meat combos back when I ate meat that
I also didn't like, like prostudo and melon like some

(11:50):
people love that. I just never it was never for me.

Speaker 3 (11:52):
I can see that I'm not the biggest pineapple guy either.
You know, I'm not opposed to sweet flavors on a pizza,
but pineapple is like so sweet and so juicy, it
just seems a little over the top for me. The
big one that I can't do that a lot of
people love is not a topping, but an alternate sauce,
And people love these barbecue chicken pizzas with barbecue sauce
is the pia. I can't deal with barbecue sauce and

(12:14):
the sauce. That's just that's not doing it for me.

Speaker 2 (12:16):
I remember having some of those, like California Pizza kitchen
type thing, and I liked it back in the day.
I think I can take some barbecue sauce out of context.

Speaker 3 (12:26):
Apparently I can't. I just can't hang all right.

Speaker 2 (12:29):
So getting back to the actual study here, we've firmly
established why it is funny. You know, it's lizards eating pizza.
Why does it matter? Well, despite being hilarious, the study
here too is certainly a valid inquiry. As we've discussed
on the show before, human cities, especially greatly alter the

(12:50):
lifestyles and diets of the creatures that continue to thrive
in them, and for most of you listeners, this is
instantly going to bring to mind things like pigeons and
rats obviously, but it also concerns all manner of creatures
that find ways to thrive in human augmented environments. Highly
adaptable creatures with varied opportunistic diets often do quite well.

(13:11):
And in parts of Africa that means rainbow lizards. You
know what they're eating from our refuse why and then
what it's doing to their health and door behavior is
totally worth studying. If for no other reason you might
think of it as like they're eating pizza because of us,
it's kind of our responsibility to figure out why this
is happening and what are the ramifications.

Speaker 3 (13:31):
Yeah, entirely makes sense, and I would think that you
could also probably learn some interesting things about the lizard
and about its relationship to its environment by studying what
kinds of pizza it likes best.

Speaker 2 (13:43):
Exactly exactly now, Joe, I included an image of a
gama agama for you right here, the rainbow lizard. I
do encourage listeners out there when it is safe to
do a search as well, so that you can see
this creature.

Speaker 3 (13:57):
It is.

Speaker 2 (13:57):
It's quite a stunning lizard. You can understand why was
subsequently introduced into Florida. Via the reptile trade. Like it's
a gorgeous lizard.

Speaker 3 (14:05):
Yeah, yeah, it's striking, bright orange head.

Speaker 2 (14:08):
Bright orange head, dark body. Yeah. So they're also known
as the common agama and the red headed rock agama.
It's found throughout most of Sub Saharan Africa, which is
a considerable range. It's endemic to a number of Sub
Saharan African countries and has also again unfortunately, been introduced
into Florida via the reptile trade. They're primarily insectivores. They

(14:32):
live in social groups built around feuding lead males and
apparently the conflict between these males. It's more pronounced in
urban environments because they're kind of constricted in their territory,
so they can't spread out as much and they grow
to around thirty centimeters or eleven point eight inches in length.

(14:54):
Now in the paper, the authors point out that the
species has high ecological plasticity, especially so far as thermal
ecology and foraging strategy goes. So in rural areas they're
strictly diurnal, but in urban areas they apparently make use
of artificial lighting to become nocturnal foragers. And apparently most

(15:15):
of this has to do with keeping their body temperature up,
taking advantage of those lights to stay warm in the night,
and continuing to hunt. Oh interesting at first. When I
first read it, I thought, oh, well, you know, insects
drawned with lights, and maybe that's a part of it.
I didn't read that specifically, but it seems like thermal
regulation is the main feature here now. In addition to

(15:35):
eating insects, though, it has for a while been observed
that they will sometimes eat certain bread based foods, and
this led directly into this study that considered that asked
the question what sort of pizzas do they prefer? And
this took place at a particular seaside resort in Togo.

(15:58):
I'm going to read from the paper here. After having
opportunistically observed an adult male quote stealing a piece of
four cheese pizza from tourists by climbing a table, we
decided to investigate whether this behavior was occasional or usual
in this rainbow lizard population. So again, observations of adult

(16:18):
lizards not only you know, dining on thrown away slices
of pizza or you know, pizza bones in a garbage can,
but just straight up stealing slices of pizza pizza rat
style from human tourists.

Speaker 3 (16:30):
That's a bold lizard. Yeah, has become accustomed to our
delicious foods.

Speaker 2 (16:35):
Yeah. So the researchers here decided to do a little
taste test. They set up feeding stations for the lizards
that featured two different pizza selections, so a little bit
of a you know, like a pizza bar scenario, but
with only two choices. One choice was the four cheese pizza,
which they had already been observed stealing, and the others

(16:56):
was a four seasons pizza. I don't know about you,
Joe was not super familiar with this, but it's apparently
traditional in many areas. It's divided into four sections, So
one quarter of the pizza is artichoke hearts for spring,
and then another quarter is basil and tomatoes for summer,
and then another quarter is mushrooms for autumn, and then

(17:16):
another section is ham for winter.

Speaker 3 (17:19):
I just looked it up. No, I've never had one
of these before.

Speaker 2 (17:22):
Yeah, I mean, you know, sound I guess it sounds
fine to me. I have no objections, but but you know,
we'll get to what the lizards think. So the lizards
here had a choice between a cheese pizza and a
mostly veggie pizza, but one that also featured a little
bit of meat, and all of the rainbow lizards observed
went purely for the four cheese pizza.

Speaker 3 (17:45):
Interesting. I wonder, why could that be visual differences or
it's actually like nutritionally preferable to them, or.

Speaker 2 (17:52):
I wonder, Yeah, the authors here right that this suggests
quote that they may have some chemical cues attracting them,
or that the specific four cheeses type may provide nutrients
that are more easily digested, which I mean that also,
I realized sounds a little crazy, right because we're talking
about cheese here, we're talking about a dairy product, and

(18:16):
it's you know, it's one thing to talk about mammals
consuming dairy even when they shouldn't, such as you know,
giving a cat a saucer of milk. Yes, they do
it in the cartoons and in the movies all the time,
but I think most of us know by this point
you're not supposed to do that. But these are lizards, right,
Why would lizards need cheese? Why would lizards need milk?

(18:38):
In fact, I was looking around and like, in general,
pet owners who have lizards are generally reminded, do not
feed your lizard milk. Do not give your lizard cheese.
They don't need it, they can't handle it.

Speaker 3 (18:52):
Interesting, okay, But then did the researchers like study like,
were the lizards who were eating this pizza like in
bad health?

Speaker 1 (19:00):
No?

Speaker 2 (19:00):
Apparently, so this is definitely one of those areas where
more research is required. But it seemed to be this
be the case that the pizza eating lizards were doing. Okay,
it's not like they were getting bloated on pizza and
then just like you know, dying in the sun or anything.
They seem to be in good overall health. And it

(19:21):
seemed like one of the leading hypotheses here is that
they're perhaps benefiting from a high fat, high calorie energy
boost when they eat this cheese pizza, specifically the cheese here.
As for like the bread itself, I don't. I don't.
I'm not to understand that that has any like real impact.
But maybe that's the main way that these lizards, lizards

(19:41):
have been observed to obtain cheese like this off of
a you know, a type of food that has spread
around the world, like invasive pet lizard species. In this case, the.

Speaker 3 (19:52):
Pizza rob I've found a slightly related story. Would you
like to hear about it? It's only sort of related.
It's not about lizards eating pizza, but it's close.

Speaker 2 (20:13):
Hey, it's close. Even then, we should definitely explore it.

Speaker 3 (20:16):
Okay, So did you know that one of the most
extreme cases of constipation ever documented in nature was caused
by a lizard eating at a pizza parlor?

Speaker 2 (20:28):
Wow? This absolutely sounds unreal.

Speaker 3 (20:32):
To be clear, we have no evidence that the lizard
was eating pizza itself, but I guess we can't be sure.
But part of the cursed concoction that this lizard consumed
seems to have been sand contaminated with pizza grease and
some other stuff, including other lizards that may also have

(20:53):
been eating pizza grease and greasy sand. So yeah, delicious, right.
So here My source is a press release on the
website of the Florida Museum of Natural History from April
twenty twenty by Halle Marchesi, and the story goes like this,
Some researchers at the University of Florida and at the

(21:14):
Florida Museum came into possession of a remarkable specimen, an
adult female northern curly tailed lizard. The species is Leocephalus caronadus,
and this northern curly tailed lizard was so constipated when
they found it that the mass of impassable poop in

(21:37):
its digestive tract had become almost eighty percent of the
animal's total body mass. I think the exact figure was
seventy eight point five percent. Yikes, so more poop than lizard.

Speaker 2 (21:50):
Wow. Wow. I mean, the only thing that even comes
close to this were examples we've discussed of specific scorpion
species that lose their ability to poop if they have
to eject their tail and therefore cannot poop for the
rest of their lives. But that this sounds even more impressive.

Speaker 3 (22:09):
So at the time, and I don't know if this
has been surpassed since, but I kind of doubt it.
The authors believed this was the largest feces to body
mass ratio ever recorded in a living animal, so it
was the most constipated a live animal had ever been
as far as we have documented. Obviously, we can't know
what has happened out there in nature, but the most

(22:31):
constipated animal we've ever seen.

Speaker 2 (22:33):
Do you think this? I'm imagining the cinematic moment where
the researchers suddenly get really serious and one is like,
you know, I think this is it. I think this
is the largest feces to body mass ratio ever recorded.
I think it's happening.

Speaker 3 (22:46):
Oh, I think I'm about to describe that moments. So
one of the researchers, a PhD candidate at the time
named Natalie Klaunch, is quoted in this press release saying
that when they caught the lizard, they first assumed because
it was an adult female, they first assumed it was
about to lay eggs quote, but when we went to

(23:07):
feel for eggs, it just felt like it was full
of silly putty. So they did a CT scan of
the lizard and they discovered it had this gigantic fecal
bullus stuck in its digestive system. And again, the bullus
to body mass ratio was huge. It was so far
past the previous record that it was crazy. The previous

(23:29):
record was in a Burmese python, and this ratio was
six roughly six times greater than that. Edward Stanley, director
of the Florida Museum's Digital Discovery and Dissemination Laboratory, said, quote,
I was blown away by how little room there was
left for all the other organs. If you look at

(23:51):
the three D model, it has only a tiny space
left over in its ribcage for the heart, lungs, and liver.
So the sad part of this story is that unfortunately
this condition was not survivable for the lizard. The lizard
was humanely euthanized. But how did it get so constipated. Well,
this lizard had been feeding in the parking lot next

(24:13):
to the grease collection bin outside of a pizza parlor
in Cocoa Beach, Florida, and the researchers think that this
lizard was probably hunting insects and other smaller lizards that
were drawn to the pizza grease, and as a result,
it was ingesting a lot of greasy sand. It had

(24:34):
probably eaten a bunch of insects. I think they said
it had eaten another lizard in a knoll and a
bunch of grease soaked sand along with these other meals,
and this turned into the bullus that it couldn't pass. Now, Rob,
you were just speaking about invasive lizards in Florida. The
northern curly tail lizards originally native to Cuba, the Bahamas,

(24:56):
and the Cayman Islands are also not originally to Florida.
They were intentionally introduced to Florida in the nineteen forties
in an attempt to control agricultural pests. How many times
have we heard that story they were brought into control.
I think it was sugar cane pests, and as so
often happens, they became a problem in their own right,

(25:17):
out competing and threatening native lizard species and contributing to
a decline in the native diversity of reptiles in Florida.
Apparently they are especially at risk for getting blocked up
intestines because their diet is so diverse, and they will
eat all kinds of things they find in human environments.
To quote Claunch in that article, quote from bits of

(25:40):
fish to cheese and crackers. So again, we don't know
for sure that this lizard was actually eating pizza. It
was eating in the parking lot next to the pizza parlor,
But I don't know cheese and crackers. Is that too
far off from pizza or be happening.

Speaker 2 (25:57):
Let's not ignore the possibility that it just right up
ordered and a bug in sand pizza from this place,
turtle style yea, and consumed it. In the parking lot
and paid the paid the ultimate price.

Speaker 3 (26:10):
A Sicilian style with extra sand. So the article emphasizes
how unlikely it is that you would find a lizard
this constipated alive in the wild, because usually they end
up usually they're only going to eat small amounts of
sand as they consume prey. It seems like this one
must have eaten a lot of grease contaminated sand, and

(26:32):
when they do get constipated, they become sluggish, so it's
pretty easy for predators to pick them off, but that
had not yet happened to this one. Though. I do
wonder this is not anything that the sources were suggesting.
I'm just just guessing here. Would those predators now have
a higher likelihood of also getting constipated. You got to

(26:53):
wonder if if you're a bird or something and you
eat a lizard that is actually like eighty percent fecal
bullus made of largely, you know, pizza, grease, and sand,
do you get constipated with pizza, grease, and sand.

Speaker 2 (27:07):
Oh? I don't know. I mean, I guess in this scenario,
the predator in question, be it a like a raptor
or what have you, has to end up consuming the
lizard hole and not rupturing it in a way that
might turn it off, like if you were to rupture
the creature with your talons and then realize it's basically
one big lump of pooh. I you know, I don't

(27:29):
don't know my raptors well enough to whether that would
be at a turrent if the raptor might say, actually,
I'm in way over my head here and I'll just
leave this one. B maybe I'll only eat a part
of it, or you know how that ends up going down.
I know that, Like, there are various predators who you know,
that do not want to consume the fecal matter of
their prey, like I believe. I remember reading that Komodo dragons,

(27:52):
for example, might like swing the animals around like to
dislodge in intestines that may have fecal matter inside them.
So even if you're eating most of the animal, you
might not eat it home. But then again, there are
also plenty of examples of animals that absolutely do eat
their prey hole and then either it all passes through

(28:13):
or you know, some of it gets you know, barfed
back up again and the rest continues. The journey.

Speaker 3 (28:19):
Researchers who made this discovery? Are you listening? Do you
have any insight on this? I would love to know more?
Right and tell us what's going on in Florida? Contact
at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

Speaker 2 (28:30):
All right, well, what do you have as a selection? Joe?
Which is the first that you decided to pick off
the list? Here?

Speaker 3 (28:36):
Okay? I decided today to talk about the twenty twenty
five Psychology Prize. This year's Psychology Prize was presented to
Marson Zagenkowski of the University of Warsaw in Poland and
Jill Jiniak of the University of Western Australia. Quote for
investigating what happens when you tell narcissists or anyone else

(28:59):
that they are intelligent? So the name of the winning paper,
published in twenty twenty one in the journal Intelligence perhaps
emphasizes what's funny about this more than the ceremony language does.
It's called telling people they are intelligent correlates with the
feeling of narcissistic uniqueness, the influence of IQ feedback on

(29:20):
temporary state narcissism.

Speaker 2 (29:23):
Okay, So the basic idea of being that by telling
someone they're smart, you could at the very least induce
temporary narcissism in them.

Speaker 3 (29:30):
Yeah. Yeah. This is a part of a long running
tradition where it's a study where what's funny about it
is that the result seems ridiculously obvious. If you tell somebody, oh, wow,
our tests confirm that you are much smarter than other people,
it will tend to increase their feelings that they are
special and unique, at least temporarily.

Speaker 2 (29:52):
Right until you do the next dumb thing and then
you're like, ooh, maybe that finding was off.

Speaker 3 (29:58):
So many Ignobel winners over the years, especially in psychology,
have this quality. What's funny about them is that they
find something that seems really obvious. It's like, well, I
could have told you that. This is also a common
refrain from the comments section underneath any write up of
a new finding, especially from the social sciences, something in

(30:19):
economics or political science or psychology. You know, people just
chiming in to say that's obvious. You didn't need an
experiment to tell you that. I've made this point many
times on the show before, including in previous Ignobel episodes,
but I just want to do my brief speech on
this again right now. To the extent people actually mean
this kind of thing when they say it. I think

(30:40):
this point of view really misunderstands the purpose of most experiments,
and it misses the value of science. The whole reason
we have experimental science is to test what we think
will happen against what actually happens. So we have a
hypothesis and we subject it to an experiment. Sometimes the
results apport the hypothesis, sometimes they don't. So if you

(31:03):
say I have an intuition about how this experiment will
come out, therefore you shouldn't run an experiment, that essentially
reduces to saying that we shouldn't have experimental science at all.
It's like saying, however, I assume the world works based
on just living my life and getting a vibe is
good enough. We don't need to look any deeper. Now.

(31:25):
That doesn't mean, on the other hand, that every scientific
experiment and every paper published is amazingly valuable. You know,
there are some phenomena that are probably not the most
important things in nature to study, though sometimes you don't
realize how important something is until after you study it.
And of course I would say that the most important
criticism you could make of a study is if its

(31:46):
design is poor meaning, it could be generating false knowledge.
But I would argue that just looking at the result
and saying I could have told you that is not
a good criticism of research, because the history of science
is full of counterintuitive things where a lay person would
assume an experiment would find one thing, and instead it

(32:07):
finds the opposite. Even in psychology, there are tons of
results that violate a lay person's intuition and have proven robust,
meaning they've been replicated many times by independent teams of researchers,
and we've talked about a bunch of these on the
show before. Just in the domain of psychology, I think
about the great example that it is a super common
lay intuition that we are really good at spotting lies

(32:31):
and liars. Most people think that they can tell when
somebody is lying to them by I don't know, reading
facial expressions or verbal cues. Tests show over and over
again that Nope, our intuitions here are very misguided. We
grossly overestimate our ability to tell when people are lying
to us. In the same vein rob remember those episodes

(32:52):
we did on authenticity last year, it's very common lay
intuition that we can tell when people are being inauthentic
when not really being themselves. Turns out if you test this,
like if you compare other people's ratings of Johnny's authenticity
to Johnny's own rating of how authentic he's being in
an interaction, the correlation tends to be pretty low. We

(33:14):
think we can tell, but actually we're not very good
at it.

Speaker 2 (33:17):
Yeah, it just turns out we're all jerks.

Speaker 3 (33:21):
And I could go on and on listing a bunch
of things like this. There are just so many things
that we think based on intuition and life experience, and
when we test those assumptions, some are broadly confirmed. Sometimes
lay intuition is right, other times it's wrong, and it
gets contradicted in interesting ways. And this final point is
very important. Sometimes the process of investigating the assumption with

(33:45):
an experiment, even if it confirms our intuition, it reveals
new ways of thinking about the issue, and it leads
us to ask new questions we didn't think of before.
So I'll get off my soapbox now, but I just
do want to reiterate this thing. I probably end up
saying this most years when we talk about the ignobels
in one way or another. I could have told you

(34:05):
that is not a good criticism.

Speaker 2 (34:08):
Now, another criticism that often is leveled at the sorts
of papers that are honored in the ig Nobel Prizes
is like, well, this is not an important study. It's
not answering important questions or solving important problems. It's not
big enough, and like this tends to I don't know,
it kind of comes back to that saying, you know
that the modern scientists there they're standing on the backs

(34:28):
of giants, which is true, but they're also standing on
a lot of gnomes and halflings and other smaller Like
there's a lot of small studies in science that are
just necessary stepping stones and the whole ordeal. Again, I
think if we just think about science, is this thing
like this, this focused lamp that we need to shine

(34:50):
onto various problems, Like sometimes it is that, but it
also is about the like the larger you know, full
lantern elimination.

Speaker 3 (34:58):
Yeah, that's true. I mean there are a lot of
things going on. A lot of experiments that don't seem
very exciting to the layperson are just laying important groundwork,
like testing a tool or a concept to see if
it is valid and thus can it be used in
further research or making establishing a small establishing something in
a small setting to see is it worth investigating with

(35:20):
a more high powered study, right or again, as is
often the case, you know, looking into things that might
be of interest to the researcher, but a lot of
people would say, well why does this matter? And you
don't always know why it might matter. Maybe it doesn't
end up mattering to the whole world that much. And
then other times things could have very squarely been seen

(35:41):
when they were first being studied and the why does
this matter category, and then they turned out to be
a huge significance.

Speaker 2 (35:48):
Right right, I mean figuring out why lizards certain lizards
eat certain pizzas. It's probably not going to cure cancer.
But ultimately, with science you never know exactactly you know,
what discovery leads to another discovery. It's not I mean,
it's not incompletely impossible. All right, Well let's get back

(36:08):
to these narcissists.

Speaker 3 (36:10):
Right, So this study, I don't think this is going
to cure cancer, but I do think it is interesting.
So again the paper is called telling people their intelligent
correlates with the feeling of narcissistic uniqueness. The influence of
IQ Feedback on Temporary State Narcissism. And again this is
by Marson Zegenkowski and Jill E. Geniak, published in the

(36:30):
journal Intelligence twenty twenty one. So the authors begin by
making a statement that will take a little bit of unpacking,
but that statement is a statement about the background research
stuff that has already been established before they started their
paper here, and that background research finding is that what's
called grandiose narcissism is positively correlated with self assessed intelligence

(36:55):
or SAI. Now let's define terms here, starting with psychological
concept of narcissism. It is defined in the Encyclopedia of
Social Psychology as follows quote. Narcissism in its extreme forms
is considered a personality disorder. It is defined as a
syndrome or combination of characteristics that includes the following a

(37:20):
pervasive pattern of grandiosity, self importance, and perceived uniqueness, a
preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success and power, exhibitionism and
attention seeking, emotional reactivity, especially to threats to self esteem,
displays of entitlement and the expectation of special treatment from others,

(37:44):
and an unwillingness or inability to show empathy. So that's
a lot of different things. It's hard to say that
all in one short phrase, but I would say, for
simplicity's sake, you can think of narcissism as an extreme
form of self centeredness that manifests in a host of
characteristic behaviors, these kind of behavior clusters that we see

(38:07):
happening together again and again. And those behaviors include the
need for praise, attention and adoration, the lack of empathy
for others, the sense of entitlement and a desire for
special treatment, and so forth.

Speaker 2 (38:21):
Now, but before anybody self diagnosis too much, just remember
all those things can occur to varying levels in just
about any of us. We're talking about, you know, all
the all the lights burning at the same time here, right.

Speaker 3 (38:34):
And there's also a difference this paper will address between
trait narcissism and state narcissism. You know, you can in
a particular you can get into a particular state where
you show more of certain narcissistic tendencies than you would
in the rest of your life, for example.

Speaker 2 (38:50):
And that's an I think that's important to note because
just you know, as a reminder that you know you
can get into this narcissistic state without being like a
narcissist all the time. You know, it's kind of without
thinking like, oh, I'm not a narcissist. I could never
be like that. Well you could at least at least
in bursts, and therefore you know it pays to watch

(39:11):
out for that in your own behavior.

Speaker 3 (39:13):
But there is also a special thing, which is where
you see this syndrome where somebody pretty consistently displays all
of these traits and they cluster together and like that.
That's sort of a type of person. So that that's

(39:35):
narcissism in general. But what about the grandiose part. Grandiose narcissism.
Grandiose narcissism is one of two main types of narcissism
identified by the authors. These are grandiose narcissism and vulnerable narcissism.
For a succinct distinction here, I found another paper from
twenty eighteen in Frontiers and Psychology called vulnerable and grandiose

(39:59):
narcissism are differently associated with ability and trait emotional intelligence.
And note that the first listed of the four authors
on this paper here was the same as the Ignobel paper.
That's Marson Zagenkowski The authors make the distinction as follows quote.
Grandiose narcissism is characterized by high self esteem, interpersonal dominance,

(40:20):
and a tendency to overestimate one's capabilities, whereas vulnerable narcissism
presents defensive, avoidant, and hyper sensitive attitude in interpersonal relations. So,
based on these definitions, I would say that your grandiose
narcissist is probably the most stereotypical type of egomaniac, all

(40:44):
of the typical self obsessed and self privileging narcissistic traits,
but with an emphasis on really high opinion of your
own abilities and powers and an orientation toward personally getting ahead, competitiveness, dominance,
and self aggrandize.

Speaker 2 (41:00):
All right, yeah, this is your kind of classic. The
Emperor has no close sort of narcissism, right.

Speaker 3 (41:06):
So that's the grandiose narcissism. The other definition from the
opening statement would be self assessed intelligence, which is pretty straightforward.
It's not how smart you actually are, but how smart
you think you are. So again, the background knowledge is
that people who score high in grandiose narcissism also tend

(41:27):
to rate their own intelligence very highly. And as a
side note, I think it's worth exploring for a minute
the idea that having high confidence in your own intelligence.
You know, at first, when I think about that, I
have a negative reaction to that, and they're like, Oh,
that's pompous, that's no good, which I don't think I'm

(41:47):
wrong in thinking that. But also it's worth noting that
having high confidence in your own intelligence can have both
good and bad consequences. In terms of good consequences, studies
have found that even if you can't for actual intelligence
or actual ability, higher self assessed intelligence is correlated with
some desirable outcomes, like greater feelings of well being, and

(42:11):
some studies have found it correlated with better academic achievements.
So there are some benefits to seeing yourself as smart,
whether or not you're actually smart, and there could be
a lot of reasons for this. For example, one possibility
is just, even beyond the narrow domain of intelligence, just
generally believing I can do this whatever the domain allows

(42:35):
you to take more risks and actually pursuing goals and
developing your own skills compared to someone who is actually
at the starting point just as capable as you, but
feels I cannot do this and thus doesn't take any
risks on development or skill attainment, doesn't get opportunities for
success and so forth. As you know, as the saying goes,

(42:56):
some percent of success is showing up, and in some cases,
believing I am very smart helps motivate you to show up,
whether or not you're right about that.

Speaker 2 (43:06):
Yeah, all right, that makes sense.

Speaker 3 (43:07):
On the other hand, if we should absolutely note that
there are major downsides to high self assessed intelligence. For example,
if you go through life thinking I am very smart,
I would argue it makes you more likely to fool
yourself into dangerous misguided certainty, makes you more subject to
intellectual hubris. It can prevent you from paying attention to

(43:30):
good advice from others. One big thing you see with
people high in grandiose, narcissistic traits who rate their own
intelligence very highly is that they do not take feedback
that contradicts them. So if a piece of information contradicts
their view or contradicts their way of understanding the world

(43:51):
or their view of themself, they attack the new information
or they attack the person delivering the new information, rather
than incorporating that information as feedback and updating their model.
And this is one reason it can be so dangerous
to have grandiose narcissists in like leadership and authority positions,
and they do often end up there. You know, this

(44:14):
is a personality type that specifically is set up to
reject information that is threatening to their ego.

Speaker 2 (44:21):
And it's just curious that this does kind of get
back to what you were talking about earlier about the
basic mission of science to sometimes explore things that we
feel are to one level or another already settled in
our own mind.

Speaker 3 (44:33):
Yeah, yeah, you can find out you were on Yeah,
And it's good to pay attention when you get that
signal and not just say, oh, that can't be right,
that's not already what I think right. A few more
interesting facts from the introduction to this paper, just little
tidbits here. One is that we may have talked about
this on the show before, but the so called better

(44:53):
than average effect most people believe their own intelligence is
above average. It's interesting giving people an intelligence test tends
to reduce our level of overestimation of our own intelligence.
And so this occurs not even at the getting your
score on the test stage, like you just take the

(45:14):
problem solving portion of the test, and this experience of
the task itself reduces people's overconfidence about their own intelligence.
It's something about the process, like having to solve the problems.
And finally, though on average we are we're all likely
to overestimate our own intelligence, some people overestimate their intelligence

(45:36):
more than everybody else, particularly people who score high in
the traite narcissism. But anyway, coming back to the main
thrust of the paper here, yes, grandiose narcissism is correlated
positively with self assessed intelligence. It is typically assumed in
the scientific literature that the direction of causation here flows

(45:59):
from the narcarcissism to the self assessed intelligence. In other words,
because I have a narcissistic personality, I think I am
very smart. I think I'm smarter than other people. But
the central question the authors are asking in this paper is,
to some extent, could the causation be going the other
way or could it be going in both directions? Could

(46:21):
it be that something causes me to think that I
am very smart, thus I become more likely to exhibit
narcissistic traits. So the authors designed an experiment with three
hundred and sixty four subjects where they measured the effects
of giving the subjects IQ tests and then randomly telling
the subjects either that they performed better than average or

(46:43):
that they performed worse than average. The subjects also took
standard inventories to measure the presence of particular narcissistic personality
traits or state traits, you know, things that could just
indicate being in a narcissistic state of mind temporarily. Specifically,
the authors were looking to see if there were temporary
boosts to traits of what's called narcissistic admiration, which quote

(47:08):
is characterized by striving for uniqueness, grandiose fantasies, and charming behavior.
And the authors found that feedback from the IQ test,
which to be clear, was random it's not actually reflective
of performance, did positively correlate with people's self assessed intelligence.
So if you tell somebody that they did better than

(47:29):
average on this IQ test, it did also make them
see themselves as smarter, And it also temporarily increased one
particular subscale of narcissistic admiration, but not the others. The
one part of narcissism that it did increase, at least temporarily,
was known as striving for uniqueness, which the authors characterize

(47:53):
as the feeling of being special, bragging about one's abilities,
and the enjoyment of one's successes. So the core hypothesis
there was that it was a kind of mixed result.
Actually did not find that telling people they did well
on an IQ test increased all aspects of narcissistic admiration,
but it did significantly increase one aspect of it. Also,

(48:16):
the people who were told that they did below average
on the test reported lower self assessed intelligence afterwards, so
the effect went both ways, and they tested lower on
temporary measures of the same narcissism subscale striving for uniqueness.
So the authors say, we conclude that IQ feedback may

(48:36):
shape people's beliefs about their intelligence, and that lay concepts
of intelligence might incorporate some narcissistic elements, such as the
feeling of being uniquely special. So, like any good research,
this raises more questions. If it's true that being told
you did well on this IQ test causes at least

(48:58):
a temporary increase in, but not all, components of state narcissism.
Is it possible that things like this could have an
additive effect over time. Could it be that various types
of positive feedback about intelligence could be contributing to the
narcissism of the world. In other words, like, not only

(49:21):
are people high in narcissistic traits going around with an
inflated view of their own intelligence. We already know that
is true, but perhaps people all over, regular people too
are being pushed in a more narcissistic direction by getting
various kinds of lavish and unearned praise about how smart

(49:41):
they are. I think there are a lot of ways
this can happen, but I'm just thinking, like every time
they ask chat GPT a question, it starts the answer with, Wow,
that's a great question. You are so curious and thoughtful
for asking that. You know it is so special. And
to be clear, like this is not to proven finding
of the paper, but I think it's a really interesting

(50:03):
question that it raises and something that would be a
good subject for future research.

Speaker 2 (50:07):
Oh now, now I'm worried about those of us who
I don't do this every episode obviously, but who periodically
interview people for a podcast, because what is kind of
like a go to response when you ask a question, Sometimes,
whether it's a good question or not, the interview subject
will say that's a good question or that's a great question.

(50:29):
And even though I, deep down, you know, know that
that wasn't necessarily a great question, am I letting that
sink in? Am I on some level? Am I saying yeah,
that was a great question. I'm a great interviewer.

Speaker 3 (50:42):
I know the feeling. Rob Yeah, No, I mean there
are so many ways that we have to be sensitive
to the fact that in a you know, if you're
dealing with nice and polite people, they might be kind
of buttering you up, or maybe even maybe some people
are intentionally manipulating you. But even put that aside, people
who are buttering you up to manipulate you on purpose, Yeah,

(51:06):
lots of just pleasant, happy interactions could potentially, like if
this does actually have a kind of additive effect on
personality over time. We don't know that it does, but
if it does, could be encouraging people to become more
narcissistic in certain ways. Now, I don't know if that
were actually the case. I don't know what the remedy
would be. I don't know if we should be going

(51:26):
around negging each other all the time. That seems wrong too.

Speaker 2 (51:30):
The world needs to be a little more negative. It's
our only hope. Yeah, it's kind of difficult to suss
out what you do with that. I mean, I guess,
I guess there are some definite application points for you know, balancing,
you know, praise and like, you know, in in the

(51:50):
teaching environments and in the home environment, we'll.

Speaker 3 (51:54):
Be giving being given positive encouragement, a lot of positive encouragement,
but also just very straightforward feedback. Yeah, it's like, you know, yeah,
you can do this. Here's what you didn't do right
this time. You can try again, you can make progress,
You're doing well. Yeah, yeah, I don't know. I mean,
I'm not trying to tell teachers how to teach. I
don't know what. I don't know what actually works. But yeah,

(52:17):
so I think this does raise a lot of interesting questions,
and obviously I think the investigation of the subject does
not end here, Like there are more questions to ask,
Like we were talking about earlier, a couple more interesting
elements I wanted to mention from the paper. One that
I thought was actually quite funny was subjects who got
positive feedback, who you know, were told you did better

(52:40):
than average, rated the test as more valid than those
who got negative feedback. Yeah, something's wrong with that test.
And then also I'm coming back to not just regular people,
but specifically people who showed higher narcissism. Narcissism generally caused

(53:01):
people to rate their own intelligence more highly, but this
was especially true in the condition where subjects got negative
feedback when they were told that they had done worse
on average. This seems to indicate a very important role
of narcissistic behavior patterns in ego protection. This seems to

(53:22):
be a lot of what narcissism is about. Narcissism means
that you are more likely to ignore and discount feedback
that reflects poorly on yourself, and so it is especially
important in maintaining a high self assessment in the face
of ego threatening information. It's kind of the narcissistic superpower

(53:47):
is just like, you know, you don't get discouraged when
you do bad on a test. It's like the test
was wrong.

Speaker 2 (53:52):
Yeah yeah, because you have to you have to deflect
against these things. You could negatively impact the swollen ego
here yeah yeah. Where in reality like that, the ego
swelling probably needs to go down a little bit. Yeah yeah,
it needs a needs a bit more balance here. This
is the the the engorged bladder needs to be drained.

Speaker 3 (54:12):
Yeah, And I guess another way to think about it
is just that this paper exists somewhere within the domain
of trying to understand both the functioning but also the
positives and negatives of self assessment. That you know that
there are good things, there are like empowering things that
can come out of positive self assessment, and there are

(54:34):
also negative and destructive things that can come out of it,
and a lot of maybe, uh, self cultivation and living
the good life is about trying to understand how these
things work in your own mind and balance them correctly,
to empower yourself with enough positive self assessment that like
you feel you feel like you can do things and

(54:55):
you can you know, pursue opportunities and take risks and
stuff like that, but also not puffing yourself up and
thinking you're better than other people.

Speaker 2 (55:03):
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, like you have to be at least
a little over confident at times to try new things,
to take risks. I mean to a certain extent. It's like,
how many podcast episodes would we not have even done
had we not been maybe a little over confident at times,
you know, or just open to the idea that's like, yeah,
let's see what happens if we say we're going to
do an episode on X, Y or Z, you know,

(55:26):
and then you sort it out. Then you see what
your capabilities are, you see what the resources are, and
you find a landing spot.

Speaker 3 (55:35):
Yeah, okay, that's all I've got on the Psychology Prize
this year. But Rob, you also looked into the twenty
twenty five Aviation Prize, right, yes.

Speaker 2 (55:53):
Yes, this one went to another multinational paper, this one
by Francesco Sanchez, Mariana Melcon, Karmi Corene, and Barry Pinchot
for Ethanol ingestion affects flight performance and echolocation in Egyptian
fruit Bats, published in Behavioral Processes back in twenty ten,

(56:15):
So yeah, slightly older paper here. Why is it funny? Well,
it is a story about fruit bats getting drunk off
of fermented fruit. So it's a perfect combination of two
inherently funny things, drunken animals and just fruit bats. Just
fruit bats in and of themselves. I don't know, I'm
maybe there are a few of us out there, but

(56:35):
I just find the idea of a fruit bat hilarious.
And then fruit bats in the wild are at least
extremely amusing to observe.

Speaker 3 (56:43):
I do think certain kinds of fruit bats are among
the funniest and cutest looking animals in nature.

Speaker 2 (56:50):
Yeah, there's you know, there's like an adorable awkwardness to
them at times. I don't know. I observed one in
Indonesia like dive bombing a discarded bit of ban by
the beach, and it was I don't know, it's just there.
There was an innocence to what they were up to.

Speaker 3 (57:05):
There's a little bit of puppy about them, yeah, but
also a little bit of raggedy rat.

Speaker 2 (57:11):
Yeah. And while they're clearly not vampire bats, I think
it is always hilarious. Sometimes they kind of stand in
for vampire bats and movies. Yeah. So yeah, So it's
obvious why this is funny. As for like why it
matters and why it's a study at all. Well, the
consumption of ethyl alcohol and ripe fruits has been documented
in various creatures. We've talked about this in the show before.

(57:33):
I believe, various primates, various birds, Malaysian tree shrews, moose, elephants,
and various insects. I think mainly you're looking at cases
of the ones anyway that were coming up from me
or like fruit flies. But then also there are cases
with bees and nectar, so we're not talking about a
weird totally like what if scenario, like what if blue

(57:55):
whales drink red bull? You know, it's like because you know,
fruit bats, being of rougivores, are certainly exposed to ethyl
alcohol via ripe fruits, or at least potential to consume them,
and ethyl alcohol is present in all fleshy fruits when
those fruits have ripened sufficiently, And of course it also
goes without saying that this is the foundational principle behind

(58:18):
human alcoholic beverages as well. So the study in question
here looked at the Egyptian fruit bat, that is Rosettis agypticus,
which certainly can be found in Egypt along the expanse
of the Nile River, but its range includes large areas
throughout Africa, the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and the Indian subcontinent,

(58:39):
so that they are not just found in Egypt. The
researchers here had previously found that the marginal value of
food for Egyptian fruit bats decreases when its ethanol content
exceeds one percent. They hypothesize that if ingested food containing
more than one percent ethanol would be toxic today, these

(59:00):
bats probably causing an abriation that would then affect flight
and echolocation skills. And they predicted that this might be
the reason why Egyptian fruit bats had previously been observed
to avoid highly ripened fruits. So this is another case
where this is not highlighting something that had not been
already observed to some degree, like Egyptian fruit bats seem

(59:21):
to not really go for the hard stuff, and the
idea might be, well, maybe they don't want to get
slashed on super right fruit because they have to fly
everywhere and that could get them into problems.

Speaker 3 (59:33):
Right. Nature makes wine, but I'm not going to drink
it because I've got to.

Speaker 2 (59:36):
Drive home right right, so you know, And in the
paper the authors here discuss in abriation in various animals
driving home that numerous studies have pointed to animals displaying
decreased coordination and other negative physiological effects that can result
in reduced fitness via greater susceptibility to predation as well

(59:57):
as like fatal and debilitating accidents. And you know, sometimes
we humans have to be reminded. But this is also
this also can be the result of alcohol consumption and
human beings as well. We may like how it makes
us feel, but it can certainly make us more susceptible
to injury via accident in many different ways. And I

(01:00:17):
suppose you know, it would also make you more susceptible
to predation in cases where an animal predator was already
in play. If there's a tiger in your backyard already,
you know, maybe you should limit it to two beers
if you're having a backyard barbecue. That just sounds like
reasonable advice.

Speaker 3 (01:00:34):
Well, you know, I don't think I've ever thought about
it like this before, but I just realized that probably
a lot of unnecessary and dangerous human wild animal interactions
are fueled by alcohol on the humans part. Like when
you see a video of somebody approaching a wild you know,
going up to a snake and trying to grab it
or go you know whatever. I've been a lot of

(01:00:56):
a lot of these cases. Some of these people might
be a few beers in.

Speaker 2 (01:01:00):
Yeah, well they have very possible. I mean, certainly humans
don't have to imbibe in order to do stupid things,
but you know it probably helps, so so yeah, I
think basically this all drives home the fact that like
the changes that take place inside a human being are
also going to be present to some degree within a bat. Yes,

(01:01:23):
we cannot fully put ourselves within the mind of the bat,
but we can see how this might play out. The
authors here point out that you know alcohol, alcohol effects
multiple tissues and functions. It can impact cognition, reaction time, coordination, reflexes,
and nerve transmission. It can make a human being trip
over something in their house and hurt themselves. And we're

(01:01:44):
just walking, we're not flying, and seeing the world through
through our screeches and then the reception of those screeches.
So with the bats here, the researchers found that yeah,
Egyptian fruit bats took longer to fly between the two
landing st in this study. I believe they use like
a hallway. So this is not like you know out

(01:02:04):
in the wild. It's in an artificial testing environment after
being fed ethanol containing food, and this, they argue, indicates
that the deterrence perceived in Egyptian fruit bats for ethanol
rich fruit is justified and that its ingestion can result
in impaired flight and reduce decolocation skills. So again, this

(01:02:25):
is one of those things that yes, it kind of
sounds like a no brainer. If a bat gets drunk,
it's not going to fly as well, it's not going
to echo locate as well. But this study seem to
bear that out as well, because again, this would hurt
the bat's ability to effectively fly from one location to
the next safely, which they're having to do through, you know,
in a varied environment with all sorts of factors tree, limbs, buildings, rocks,

(01:02:49):
and so forth, and this could potentially make them more
susceptible to predation as well. And Egyptian fruit bats have
many predators, including various raptors and owls. Also the genet
which is a cat like non feline carnivore, so it's
ultimately more related to something like a bentarong as opposed

(01:03:09):
to a cat. But you look at it and it's
very much a feline like form and you know it
is and for it, the Egyptian fruit bat is on
the menu. So again like this is a study that, yeah,
it is humorous, but I also I think the study
is worth highlighting as well because the examples of animals
that seem to readily engage in high alcohol ripe fruit consumption,

(01:03:33):
like well of course, you know humans in our own way,
but also chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas. This often overshadows cases
of animals that tend to avoid such fruits, which includes
not only Egyptian fruit bats, but orengtex They have also
been observed in the wild to avoid these super ripe

(01:03:54):
ethanol rich fruits. So good role model for the teetotalers
and the sober curious.

Speaker 3 (01:04:00):
I guess, I guess it's an interesting question if there
are any generalizations you could make about the biological or
ecological factors that would cause an animal to be more
open to consuming ethanol in nature versus less open to it.

Speaker 2 (01:04:18):
Yeah, you know, I don't have the hard facts, but
just thinking in general about like what does an Egyptian
fruit bat and an orangutank have in common? I mean, well,
you know, the Egyptian the orangutank does not fly, but
the orangutank does live among the tree limbs. Then there
could be an argument made that, yeah, this is there's
maybe sort of a fine tuning of your abilities that

(01:04:40):
needs to be in place here, otherwise you're going to plummet.

Speaker 3 (01:04:44):
But then against from the ground.

Speaker 2 (01:04:45):
Yeah yeah, But then again, I mean many other cases
are going to involve situations where yeah, you could, you
could easily make the argument that, well, this is an
animal that has its predators, it has its environmental hazards,
and you know, any change to its physiological state via
the consumption of alcohol is going to be to its detriment.

(01:05:07):
But then I guess there's also a case to be made.
There's probably some exploration to be made anyway about available fruit,
you know, does it what are its options? Like is
there a case where there's just suddenly a glut of
super ripe fruit and that is just what is available, Like,
that's the biomass you have to consume and then you
just have to roll with the consequences or do you

(01:05:29):
have stuff to choose from? And can you do you
have the freedom then to say no, thank you to
the boozy fruit because I would prefer not to glide
into the side of a tree. Certainly something we could
come back to on the show with a deeper dive.
But again I think that often more emphasis is put
on the fact that there are animals that get drunk

(01:05:50):
off of fruit as opposed to looking at those that
avoid it.

Speaker 3 (01:05:53):
Yeah, interesting, totally, all right, Well does that do it
for part one of our twenty twenty five Nobel exploration.

Speaker 2 (01:06:01):
It certainly is, but hey, we'll be back on Thursday
with another look at this year's winners for the twenty
twenty five Ignobel Prizes, so we hope you'll join us then.
In the meantime, we'd like to remind everyone out there
that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science
and culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays,
a short form episode on Wednesdays, and on Fridays. We
set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a

(01:06:23):
weird film on Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (01:06:25):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:06:47):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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