November 9, 2017 • 44 mins
Each year, the Ig Nobel prizes celebrate the most absurd and humorous efforts in legitimate scientific research – and 2017’s winners do not disappoint. Join Robert, Joe and Christian as they discuss all 10 studies in a special three-part Stuff to Blow Your Mind feature. In part 2, you’ll gamble with crocodiles, stare at your twin’s reflection and measure some old man ears.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
And my name is Robert Lamb, I'm Christian and I'm
Joe McCormick. And hey, this is part two of our
seventeen Ignobles series. That's right. If you haven't listened to
(00:24):
the first one, I recommend that you go back at
least listen to the first twenty minutes because we set
up the stage for what ignobells are, how we've covered
them in the past before, and what we're doing here today.
This is really a continuation of us observing the prizes.
That being said, if there was ever a multipart episode
that you could just drop in at any point, it's
(00:46):
this one. This is a bag yeah, because because basically
we're just taking the ten different winners for the two
thousand seventeen Ignoble prizes, we divvy them up and we're
each like taking the lead on a different study discussing
why it's cool, why it's funny, and exactly what the signs.
In the last episode, we talked about liquid cats, cave bugs,
and digury do therapy, along with weird coffee mugs, and
(01:08):
now we're gonna get into even weirder stuff. Okay, So
the first prize we're going to discuss today is the
Economics Prize, ordered to Matthew Rocklough and Nancy Greer quote
for their experiments to see how contact with a live
crocodile affects a person's willingness to gamble. Okay, this sounds
like something out of a out of a James Bond
(01:29):
film right here. I'm imagining that this is like, I
don't know, based in Louisiana or Florida or something where
live crocodiles are a common sighting and then you may
go gambling it. Based in Australia, you can gamble and
you can handle saltwater crocodile. Right, Yeah, So the paper
is called never Smile at a crocodile. Betting on electronic
(01:50):
gaming machines is intensified by reptile induced arousal. Actually, there,
we should put an asterisk on the statement in that
title there, because that that's partially true depending on what
kind of gambler you are and some other things about you.
It was published in the Journal of Gambling Studies in
and so there are a lot of slot machines studies.
(02:11):
That the whole episode that right, and I think we
could do more. Robert and I have talked about doing
episodes entirely on rat slot machine studies or I mean,
there's just tons of research on slot machines, and there's
a reason for the slot machines or as the literature
refers to them, electronic gaming machines or e g m s.
They're kind of a perfect predator. They're like brilliantly designed
(02:35):
to exploit vulnerabilities in human psychology and risk management behavior,
gambling with e g m s tends to produce this
state of what's known as autonomic arousal. You and I
would just probably call this excitement, you know, physiological sensation
of excitement in the body that the brain tends to
interpret sometimes in the case of gambling, interprets as a
lucky streak, which keeps you gambling, and it leads to
(02:58):
this vicious cycle where it's more and more arousing and
you just keep wanting to bet more and more money.
Autonomic arousal not to be confused with reptile induced arousal. Well, no,
I mean, reptiles could create a state of aucomic arousal,
but yeah, not one and the same thing one could
lead to the other. So I think e g M
(03:18):
s are an interesting thing to study, and this kind
of research really matters because they fit into a similar category.
Uh that that I would put social media interface design
in this this successful technology design that is actually better
at its job than is good for us. What do
y'all think about that? With like social media interfaces that
(03:38):
I would say, it's a great success story in terms
of designing technology. But success doesn't necessarily mean morally good
or good for our lives. Well, I think we When
I think of a slot machine, I instantly think of
like somebody that's kind of shackled there to the machine
and they're just pushing buttons, uh, And there's this idea
that it's going to pay off for them, and then
(04:00):
maybe it does pay off a little bit, and then
they keep going. And with with social media, you do
see a some more situation. Someone has their phone out,
they're constantly checking this feed or that feed, this social
media appor that or another. And the win in this case,
I guess would be somebody contacting them directly or some
sort of response. Howbody like that I get on my
(04:22):
or you might even you might even have a real win.
You could have a meaningful interaction with somebody you care
about on social media, or you might come across an
interesting article that you're glad you read. Those are the
little winds, but maybe it just keeps you playing. After that,
we're speaking more little on our is social media making
us crazy? Episode from last year? And I think, yeah,
if I remember correctly, the literature basically assumes and they're
(04:47):
still looking into this of course that like the same
parts of our brain that are lit up by gambling
or lit up by social media. I think I think
that's a highly successful and correct analogy. Uh so for
social media interfaces that the job they're trying to achieve
generally is maximizing time on site. They want to keep
you on that platform as long as possible and keep
(05:07):
you looking at stuff and clicking on ads and all that.
Is that why we do those hour long Facebook lives
every Friday? I don't, Well, that's why Facebook wants us
doing those things. Yeah, I don't know what our reason is.
Maybe we're just slaves to the machine. But you didn't
know that. Basically, Yeah, the machine says you need to
do this, and we basically turned it around and said, Okay,
(05:28):
we'll do it, but if we're gonna do right, we'll
change it from the inside. Sure, yeah, that's what we're doing.
We're changing the machine. Man. But the electronic gaming machines,
I would put them in the same category. But instead
what they're seeking is not maximizing time on site, but
maximizing time on machine. Because when they maximize time on machine,
this tends toward infinity of losses for the player. It
(05:51):
leads to playing two extinctions industry term. Basically, the machine
getting all your cash and then making you come back
to play again when you've got more are draining the
host dry of its precious blood. So unless you want
to make gambling illegal or something, one of the best
defenses against this type of machine is for independent researchers
(06:12):
to study the psychology of gaming, basically to understand how
these machines exploit our brains, so we can build up
defense behaviors that people could employ independently to resist the machines,
or maybe so you could impose regulations on what types
of things these machines can do. Well, like what one
of the issues that we got into before was what
happens when a machine is speaking to you in a
(06:34):
human voice or using other kind of anthropomorphic forms, like
if if you were to pass a lot and says, look,
you can have slot machines, but they can't look like
beautiful women. They can't look like cartoon characters. That's they
can't be a cowboy that says, howdy, partner, put coins
in me. And that is actually a meaningful thing because
studies have shown that you might spend more money in
(06:56):
a slot machine that seems more humanoid and less mechanical.
So the tons of studies like this, there's just a
prolific slot machine research. This is one example that is
maybe the weirdest one I've ever come across, but I
like it. So Rock Lofting Career decided to study this
strange condition. What happens when you have the opportunity to
gamble on an e g M after you've just held
(07:18):
a saltwater crocodile. The so the subjects are tourists at
the Kurana Saltwater Crocodile Farm in Kowonga, Queensland, Australia. It
was a hundred and three subjects, forty one of them female,
uh ages eighteen to sixty six. And here's the experiment
under two different conditions. Subjects would be given money. They'll
(07:39):
give you twenty bucks, and then they ask you to
play a laptop simulated e g M sort of a
slot machine simulator written in visual basic on a laptop
computer where you would get to gamble with the money
they just gave you. And the two different conditions were this,
you could either play this game or right before you
walk into the crocodile farm or right after you have
(08:01):
cradled a one meter long saltwater crocodile in your hands.
So there are some independent variables going into this. Right
you've got obviously the control condition and the test condition
did you just walk in or have you handled a crocodile,
and so that is supposed to correspond to your level
of arousal. They did a galvanic skin conductance test to
to sort of check this and say, okay, we're people
(08:22):
actually showing physiological signs of arousal, and they determined yeah,
people who held crocodiles were physiologically aroused. But the other
independent variables would be problem gaming status, like do do
you have any of the risk factors for being a
problem gambler or affective state? Are you having negative feelings
right now, and so they'd established that by a questionnaire
(08:44):
UH that they administer at the time of the test,
like are you having emotions that we'd usually classify as
negative affect or positive affect? And then the deependit variables.
This is what they were seeing. Was was coming out
from those variables was bet size, how much you bet,
speed of betting, how asty bet, and final payouts like
what what's your your bottom line at the end of
(09:04):
the game. And the results they found where that compared
to people in the control group, holding a crocodile could
affect problem gamblers in a couple of different ways. If
you held a crocodile and had negative emotions, you actually
placed lower than average bets on the e g M.
So if you're somebody who's at risk for problem gambling,
(09:26):
they hand you a crocodile and you don't like it
and you have negative emotions, you'll actually it will tamp
down your problem gambling behaviors. You're less likely to spend
more interesting But if you are a problem gambler or
have these you know, risk factors for problem gambling, and
you hold a crocodile and you don't have negative feelings
about it, you actually place much higher than average bets
(09:48):
on the e g M. That's what I imagined would happen,
That there's some kind of like I held this dangerous
animal and everything turned out okay, so now I'm willing
to take more risks. Well, So here's how the researchers
interpreted it. I'll see what you guys think about this.
The way they interpreted it is that they're going on
what's known as the two factor model of effective states.
(10:10):
So the way they think affective states tend to happen
is that we first of all experience physiological arousal, like
there are feelings in the body that tell you something
of emotional significance is happening, and then secondary to that,
you cognitively think about it and give it some kind
of meaning or significance or cause. So what would happen,
(10:31):
say if, um, you suddenly a car is driving head
on at you in the highways. First you have the
feelings in your body there's some kind of arousal, and
then you use your sense data and your thoughts to
kind of say, okay, here's why that's happening. I'm afraid
because a car is coming at me um. And so
what that means, though, is that the feelings of arousal
(10:53):
in the body are not necessarily linked to their actual causes.
It's just something that we sort of figure you're out
secondary to having the feeling. And so the way that
might work in a gambler is if you do something
dangerous or something arousing, like holding a dangerous reptile, you
can you get this physiological sense of arousal. But the
(11:14):
gambler who doesn't have fear emotions really about that animal
or any other kind of negative emotions, can just interpret
that free floating arousal as a lucky streak. So it's like,
I'm pumped up by what just happened, and I'm that
means I'm good to go. Let's gamble. I'm I just
had the crocodile. I'm ready to drop some cash. Yeah,
(11:35):
it's content content free arousal that you can interpret in
any schema you want. And for the problem gambler, that
schema may very well be the feeling of luckiness or
the feeling of being on a roll. So I gotta
ask you, then, how well do you think Kenny Rogers
the gambler would do based on his crocodile experience was it.
Maybe here's the thing he maybe he was talking about
(11:56):
a crocodile. You've got to know when to hold the
crocodile and when to run. See, that would actually be
more specific. I've got issues with Kenny Rogers the Gambler
who doesn't because I think it fits into this category
of advice that is not actually specific enough to matter. There.
There's tons of advice like that out in the world.
(12:17):
You'll read these, you know, inspirational quotes. People have whole
books like this where they offer advice, but the advice
is actually completely generic. It's essentially like telling somebody you
should figure out what the right thing to do is.
It's like a fortune cookie. Yeah, and so in the
in the song, it's you've got to know when to
hold them, no, when to fold them. That's not advice.
Advice would be telling me what to judge that on,
(12:38):
Like how should I know when to hold them? Uh,
this is completely an aside. But if you want some fun,
look up the video of him performing that song on
The Muppet Show in the eighties. Now he does he
does give us some advice. You never count your money.
I want you sitting at the table that Okay, I'll
give him that. That is specific advice. I'll take that.
But you've got to know when to hold them, no
one to fold them. That's not advice, that's just generic
(13:01):
fortune teller stuff. But anyway, I wanted to come back
to the study because there are some masterisks we should
put on this. Number one is I want to clarify
that this only seemed to be the case for problem gamblers,
So like holding the crocodile, just for normal people who
do who did not have these risk factors for being
a problem gambler, did not seem to intensify betting, and uh,
(13:23):
like these would be people for whom gambling is not
a novel experience, but maybe holding a crocodile is, whereas
from for me, holding a crocodile is the novel experience,
as is using a slot machine. Right, so you you
probably would not place higher bets or or have intensified
gambling or reward seeking behaviors after holding a crocodile, or likewise,
(13:45):
somebody who had a strict rule like, yeah, I play
the slot machines when I go to the casino, but
I only spend five dollars and once that's gone. I'm done,
and I never break that rule. Right. Yeah, So people
who don't exhibit these behaviors, this doesn't apply to them.
It does seem to apply to people who are risk
for problem gambling. But there is a limitation to the study.
Essentially that they did not have a lot of people
(14:06):
in their sample group who showed problem gambling behaviors or
or risk factors. So one thing would be that they
should probably try to replicate this to have more confidence
in the in the result with a larger sample group
that has more problem gamblers, and it just to make
sure that they're getting a real effect and this isn't
just noise. Now. Remember also, the thing is that even
among the problem gamblers, it was only when you don't
(14:28):
have any negative moods or negative feelings about holding the
crocodile that it leads to these intensified behaviors. If you
have these negative moods, you report it actually kind of
seems to moderate your gambling behavior. And so that sets
up this quote I want to read from the paper.
Quote in some low intensity negative moods, such as boredom
or mild anxiety, contribute to large bets among at risk players.
(14:53):
Whereas high autonomic arousal without negative moods also produces relatively
large wagers. Taken together, the results suggest that betting among
at risk players may be motivated both by attempts to
alleviate low arousal dysphoric moods and by high arousal induced
positive expectations of winning money. Yeah, totally. This lines up
(15:16):
with the social media thing as well. I think, yeah,
that makes sense. So it's like when you when you're
a problem gambler and you participate in these gambling behaviors,
it seems you may be trying to counteract basically like
low level unpleasantness and seeking high arousal, high reward pleas
you know, high high pleasure interactions. Right, But if you're
(15:37):
like absolutely in the pits emotionally, you're probably not going
to be likely to gamble as much as that the
person who's just sort of low level and happy, right,
a little bit anxious, a little bit bored, that's the
target show. Yeah, So what's the what what's the overall
takeaway from this? Is there any kind of crocodile based
regulation that might be employed to help problem gambling? Well,
(15:58):
I wouldn't say crocodile based. I mean, I think it.
Studies like this actually do matter, like that, this is
the kind of thing that can help us understand the
psychological states that lead to problem gambling and can help
people either individually can help people come up with strategies
to avoid problem gambling behaviors if they know, like, Okay,
here's the state I'm in when I'm vulnerable. I know
(16:19):
when I'm in that state, I should, uh, you know,
not be around electronic gaming machines or something like that.
Like you can devise behaviors to protect yourself from your
own impulses, or you could also devise regulations on society,
like if we find out that in general, people are
just much more susceptible to electronic gaming machines under certain
(16:41):
psychological conditions, you could try to keep gaming machines from
being around in places where you would expect people to
be in those conditions. Or you end up you end
up having just like some sort of a B S
question that pops up on the screen. Uh, please write
your depression level and if you and if you and
if you ad it too appropriately, then it won't let
(17:02):
you play right, And then you do it again and
you just click the number that's required, like an age gate.
They have a test in the machine to see if
you're okay or you having kind of like no, no
real strong negative emotions, but experiencing high arousal. I don't
know how you test for that, but but if you
detect that, it's like you better not gamble right now.
(17:22):
I mean, if you wanted to do it physiologically, you
could actually do a galvanic skin conductance test, you know,
like you could test for arousal with a physical test
and not a questionnaire. Yeah, I can see that, you like,
put your arm into a cuff of some sort and test.
It's like you're too aroused. You can't, can't play right now.
But then you come back to the again, to the
the question, how much energy, how much effort, how much
(17:44):
design are slot machine makers going to be willing to
put into you know, basically protecting the host organs? Well,
of course, I mean when we did our last slot
machine episode, we had somebody right in who worked for
a gaming design company and they were like, you know,
I think you you were a little too harsh on us.
You were a little too negative about slot machines. You know,
(18:05):
I don't want to demonize them too much, because I
can understand, like, under plenty of conditions, they might just
be a fun thing people do, Like if they've got
certain limits on how much they bet, it might just
be a cool recreational activity. I don't have a problem
with that, but I think we should recognize that certain
people have conditions that make them vulnerable to this and
that can be incredibly destructive in their lives. Well, I
(18:27):
think one of the things that we observed in that
episode is that the origins of the slot machine were
very mundane and fun. It was about, uh, administering a
prize in a simple game, not unlike you know, like
a trivia machine or something in bars today. But the machine,
as machines do, uh, they they evolved, They took on
(18:49):
more advanced forms, they were designed to take on more
advanced forms. They became better and better at at carrying
out their their key bit of programming, which was, you know,
drain the sucker of its coin, the original Facebook algorithm.
Have you guys noticed this trend in video games lately
when you're in like an immersive world video game, that
there is almost always a gambling component to it, Like
(19:12):
if you're in like Skyrim you can gamble. If you're
in Red Dead Redemption, you can gamble. I'm trying to
remember what the most recent one. Oh, the Witcher. I
was playing one of those Witcher games. It's like, everywhere
you go you can sit down and gamble. I would
say that the games like that incorporate gambling elements even
outside of the gaming within the gaming things. So in
a lot of these games, you can walk up to
a slot machine and play it, or you can play cards,
(19:34):
but also when you're in the world, there are variable
reward payouts where, for example, if your achievements yeah yeah,
you know, you might kill certain enemies or something, and
they've got goodies they give you when you loot them,
and you notice you don't get the same thing every time.
It's not guaranteed. It's variable payouts, just like a slot machine,
(19:54):
and the variable payouts are a psychological hack. The variable
payouts make us think like, oh, it could be really
big next time. I'm gonna keep doing it. That's what
leads to grinding and video games. Yeah, yeah, I think
I wonder though, if there's something about the actual placing
of gambling into those games that psychologically gets players to
play longer. Yeah, I think that could very well be.
(20:16):
All right. On that note, we're going to take a
break and when we come back, we're going to jump
into the Cognition prize. Alright, we're back cognition. You say,
what have we got here? We have a paper titled
is that Me or My Twin? Lack of self face
recognition advantage in identical Twins. I saw this and as
(20:38):
we were doing the research for this yesterday a headline
popped up that was related to this. Apparently, Uh, you know,
when your phone does facial recognition as a way to unlock,
like as as a password, it has trouble with identical twins. Yeah,
so I wonder if what you're about to reveal to
us is related in a way. In a way, So,
(20:59):
this is a paper that came out in and it's
from a an Italian and Spanish team and it was
published in p Los one it. Uh, Before we get
into it, I do want to just touch basically on
the idea of identical twins. And uh, we've had some
episodes in the past. I've dealt with twins a little bit,
but I don't know, like I can't remember we've done
(21:20):
a deep dive. I know that we have some identical
twins out there listening to the show. I know that
we have parents of identical twins, siblings of identical twins, etcetera.
For a lot of us, though, our main point of
reference for identical twins ends up being fiction because how
many of example, how many examples can you think of of,
like weird twins or twins with a paranormal link. Yeah,
(21:43):
it's played up for the uncanny nous. I mean they
push it to creepy links and things like The Shining
or Dead Ringers. Yeah. Uh, and I and I say this,
I mean I have written stories about creepy twins before,
because they it does become a useful way of examining yourself,
examining identity, uh, at least if you're out an outside
(22:03):
or if you're not an identical twin. Likewise, I'm glad
you mentioned dead Ringers because you also see it used
over and over again in films. Sometimes it feels like
just pure actor or director vanity, Like let's have this
actor play two characters. Why have one James Franco when
you can have to James Franco is playing slightly different
James Franco twins. Yeah, yeah, I immediately thought of that.
(22:31):
That recent movie about the Crab Brothers legend where Tom
Hardy plays both the oh yeah, he plays he plays
identical twins. Uh. There was the recent Fargo season they
had identical twins played by the same actor. It's done
so many times that you get tired of it after
a while, unless there's a really compelling reason to have
identical twins played by single actor. I just got to
(22:53):
throw in that one of my favorite words in all
of science is the word for identical twins, the monozygotic twins. Yeah,
the monosygotic twinka. It is utilized in this paper quite
a bit now on top of so so basically it
comes down to the idea that for us non twins,
identical twins are a way to unravel ourselves. They perplex
(23:15):
us and they toy with our sense of self perception.
And as the researchers on this, uh, this paper, this
two thousand fIF paper point out, science has generally overlooked
the conundrum of self facial recognition in identical twins. We
have a lot of twin studies out there, but there
hasn't been a lot of papers that have looked at.
What happens when an identical twin looks at a photograph
(23:38):
or image of representation of their own face. Do they
experience some kind of cognitive dissonance? Yeah, because consider for
for the for the rest of us, for those of
us who are not identical twins. Um, self facial recognition
is is a major thing, and it may be a
cognitive prerequisite for theory of mind, our ability to imagine
(24:00):
the mind state of others. Because just think of all
the times you've looked in a mirror, you've taken a selfie,
or if you've looked at a picture of yourself and
you think, ah, who's that handsome devil? You know? And
then you answer that question, you you tell yourself who
that handsome devil is? Yeah? Why why is he making
a smile like that? What's that twinkle in his eyes? Um,
it's the evil twin? Well, you know, I'm I'm painting
(24:21):
in in in shades of vanity here, But there's a
there's a basic cognitive process that's going on when you
do that. You are identifying yourself and thinking about who
you are. Well, I mean people respond in hilarious, obsessive
ways to their own reflection when you notice it, like, uh,
you know, there's a reason that a lot of places
will put mirrors near elevators where people need to wait
(24:43):
for things. People just time flies. When you're looking in
a mirror, you can obsessively gaze into this image, right,
rather than worry about the people that are next to
you in the elevator. Yeah, and there's a there's a
similar uh, cognitive process going on when you look at
any face. You look at a loved one's face, you
look at a stranger's face. There's still this theory of
(25:05):
mind exercise that's going on. And what you're saying, who
is that handsome devil or who is that person with
you know, some brarow on, you know, whatever the case
may be, You're looking at the face and you're trying
to figure out who they are, at least insofar as
it relates to you. I've had like the opposite experience
with this, and I don't want to take us too
far off track, but when I used to ride the train,
(25:29):
the windows on the train were curved in such a
way that when you saw your own reflection in it,
your face was distorted a little bit, and it would
look like my forehead had ridges or something, or like
it was just it's kind of like a fun house mirror,
and I'm yeah, clings, that was exactly what it looked
like to me. Yeah, and uh, it was fascinating. I
would sit there and look at it for for the
(25:51):
whole ride and just kind of wonderment, like what if
I actually did look like that? You know. So there
is a weird sort of obsessiveness with our own uh reflection,
but also like just a slight variation on it. Yeah,
I mean, I think you see this in in skype
calls and FaceTime calls where everyone's looking at their own
picture instead of the camera. Maybe they're looking at other
(26:13):
people's pictures. I noticed it with my son because he's
just when I when I put him on FaceTime calls
with relatives, he's just captivated by the own little, the
little version of his own face, and he's not even
thinking about the call, much less someone on the other line.
And this underlines a basic reality. Our own face grabs
and retains attention longer than any other face out there, uh,
(26:36):
you know, loved one, stranger, etcetera. And this, according to
the researchers, occurs with both upright and inverted faces. So
we process upright faces faster usually, but we also have
the similar process that goes on when the face is
upside down. In fact, our ability to recognize our own
face holds true even in cases of severe face blindness,
(27:00):
accept in cases of just really catastrophic neurological or psychiatric disorder.
Another fun word the term there, I guess would be
auto prosopagnosia. Prosopagnosia is face blindness. Yes, so even in
cases of severe face blindness, again, your own face is
still going to um have a special place in uh
in in facial recognition. Okay, but there is a So
(27:23):
what we're getting at here is with the twins in particular,
they lack the ability to recognize their own face. And
these these twins that have a similar face to them, well,
I mean basically it comes comes down to the fact
that it's going to mess with this system because the
basic fact here is that if you have an identical twin,
(27:43):
then looking at your own face, looking at a representation
of your own face, it's not instantly going to be
your face. It could be your twins face. And and
so we're looking at this to see like what's different
without identical twins, and then what this reveals about our
own about everyone else's facial recognition process. Now, there are
a few other factors you have to take into account, so, uh,
(28:06):
self face processing is a right hemisphere um exercise, and
it's impaired in individuals with schizotypal traits. Also, extroverts, who
typically have better social skills, they recognize a higher number
of faces than introverts. Lower face recognition is associated with
increased social phobia. So in all of this, personality plays
(28:29):
a role in facial recognition as well, twin or not.
So this is good because it gives me a reason
to explain to my wife why I mix up like
actors and actresses all the time, because she's like, you
just think everybody looks alike, and well, no, it's because
actually I have lower face recognition because of my increased
social phobia. So, given all of of what we've discussed
(28:52):
so far, uh monosa gottic twins they pose an interesting
exception to the uniqueness of the self face because again,
when we see a representation of our own face, we
instantly know who that is. There's no room for doubt,
and the idea here with an identical twin, there's going
to be at least a little room for doubt, you know. Granted,
(29:15):
if one has an evil goatee or something, it's gonna
throw things out the window a bit. But for the
most part, uh, this is this is interesting to look
at because it turns things on its on there on
its head a little bit. So. Past predictions have been
made related to this that twins might have trouble with
self identification as they identify more as a duo. Also,
(29:37):
identical twins might sometimes mistake photos of their twin or
their self. That's been the previous thinking on this. Also,
another past study indicated that while humans can you usually
identify themselves in a mirror by age two, uh, you,
there have been cases where two year old twins discriminate
their own faces from the face of their co twins
only of exposed to the facial stimuli for a longer
(29:59):
period of time, So there might be a delay at least.
And studies have looked at young twins and their ability
to work out these faces. But prior to this study,
no one had really looked at the ability of adult
twins to tell their faces apart. Okay, so what do
we find out all right. Well, basically, the the overall
aim of the paper, according to them is quote in
(30:20):
the light of these premises, the main objective of the
present study was to examine at both configural that's based
on the whole face and featural that's based on details
of the face processing levels, whether despite their physical similarity,
twins would be better at recognizing their own face compared
to their co twin faces. So what they did is
(30:40):
they presented groups of twins with upright and inverted images
of their faces, those of a twin and a control
image of a non twin, so just some other person.
They used tin monosygonic right handed gender balanced healthy twin
couples that's the exact wording from the paper, and tin
right handed gender balanced healthy controls all white Caucasians in Rome,
(31:06):
where they where the study was held, and the control
participants the non twins. Using the study for balance, they
were matched with sex matched close friends or relatives, all
people they've known at least three years, so there'd be
a level of familiarity. This resulted in two days of tests.
First they did personality tests, then they did the facial tests,
and these were the results. Identical twins they said, seem
(31:28):
to lack the self identification advantage. However, the absence of
the self advantage depends on how much the twins report
that they physically resemble each other. Okay, so adult twins
can't pick themselves out of a lineup as easily as
most adults can, but this is mitigated by whether they
look all that much like their identical twin. Right, Yeah,
(31:52):
I want to drive home that it is. We're not
saying that twins can't tell each other apart in there,
but that there is not basically not as easily. It
also depends on their anxious and avoid an attachment style.
And they found out that quote self and co twin
faces share very similar featural, configural and matching processes, but
(32:13):
differ with respect to the higher order stages of face processing.
So this is a study. Honestly, there's so many studies
that the Igno Bell covers that I'm like, yeah, that's
of course that the nobles chose that one or their
studies that come out and you're like, oh, I can't
wait till they feature this one. They give this one,
they need noble prize. I I honestly didn't see what
(32:33):
was that funny about this one is Yeah, it seems
like right exactly. I guess maybe it's the idea of
looking at your own face upside down again, Like if
we had watched the ceremony this year, I imagine they
would have done some kind of visual gag or whatever
you know, related to this specifics. But it doesn't seem
to have an inherent gag quality to it. There's no
(32:55):
crocodile being held already using a gambling machine. There's a
liquid cats. Yeah, so it's I have trouble figuring out.
I mean, I'm glad they highlighted it. It's a case
where yeah, it's a cool study and I'm glad more
eyes are on it because it does it is important. Uh.
The take home here is again not that twins are
freaky or anything. Rather, we're looking at a slight tweaking
(33:15):
of the basic visual, safe self faced recognition, and it
illuminates what's going on in all of us now. The
researchers also argue that their findings match up with the
self referrent phenotype matching theory that we recognize our kin
by implicitly or explicitly comparing the similarity of other people's
appearance to our own. So that's another potential takeome from
(33:37):
the from the study. And again, I know we have
some identical twins out there, We have parents of identical twins,
family members and friends of identical twins. We would obviously
love to hear from all of you about this particular paper,
and we'd like to hear from evil twins as well. Yeah,
evil twins jump in. All right, let's take one more break,
and when we get back, I'm going to talk to
you guys about big years. Alright, we're back. This potato
(34:02):
has big ears. Oh that's interesting that you went there.
So there is actually a variety of slang around the
world for talking about big ears, whether it's potatoes. Yeah,
well no, but in the UK, Uh, they are sometimes
called bat ears. I had not heard that before, or
(34:22):
wing nut, which I thought wing nut was a completely
different thing. I assume that this is talking about big
ears on humans, not on other animals. Yeah, yeah, uh.
And Hindus seem to find big ears desirable because of
comparisons to the elephant god Ganesha. The French compare big
ears to cabbage, Hungarians compare them to donkey ears, and
(34:43):
the Polish compare them to pig ears. Now, this is interesting.
The Chinese believe that long ears predict prosperity and longevity.
And this is the most important to this paper that
I'm about to present to you and its purposes. I
also want to say, all of those like statements about
various societies around the world, I didn't look that up
that came out of this original paper here. This is
(35:06):
yet another Ignoble winner. It is the Anatomy Prize winner
for the article why do you old men have big ears? Oh? Man?
Because it's true? Right? It turns out it is true,
but it's this is why it's funny, right. The idea
is that it's one of these things that we all assume,
but it does turn out that there's there's some reality
(35:27):
to it. They've done lots of measurements, so let's get
into it. I'm trying to picture pig ears and I
can't what a pig ears look like. Oh, they're they're
big and flopped. Well, sometimes they're floppy, It depends on
the pig. Yeah. Oh, they're kind of like dog ear,
they're kind of like pit bull ears. Yeah yeah. Um.
So the idea for this paper actually came about this way.
(35:49):
Nineteen members of the Thames Faculty of the Royal College
of General Practitioners. We're just sitting around brainstorming and the
first question that came up to them was why do
we old men have big ears? And then they realized
they were like, well, wait a minute, actually, we need
to confirm that old men's ears are bigger and they
get bigger in the first place. So this study was
(36:10):
conducted by Dr James A. Heath Cut and he was
a general practitioner in Bromley at the time. This is
in the nineties. The paper was published in So they
asked routine patients who were coming in for surgery consultations
if it was okay if they measured their ears as
part of this research along with it. When the group
(36:32):
was thirty plus years old, from either sex and from
any racial group that came in. Interestingly, none refused. Everybody
was cool, measure my ears. This sounds fun and they
recorded this along with the patient's age, and at this
time they got two hundred and six people to participate in.
The study showed that as these participants got older, their
(36:54):
ears grew on an average of point to two millimeters
a year. What the study didn't explain is why ears
keep growing when the rest of the body stops. That
seems to be odd, right. The thing about this study
is it doesn't explain another thing. What if you're a
taller person and like Robert, Robert is taller than I am.
(37:17):
Robert's taller than Joe. So what if Robert has longer
ears simply because he's taller, and then as he gets older?
You know, so there's some discrepancies that they didn't really
fill in here with you long legs, big ears, yeah,
and well, and plus when you get older, you're gonna
be more stooped over, whereas the ears are not going
to get stooped over to go. So I could see
(37:37):
that being the illusion of like, oh, this this old person,
they're shrinking except for their ears, which there's there's no
limited sight. Yeah. Uh. And they also didn't answer, for instance,
like all of the elderly people that they checked their ears,
they were all English because they're all in this one
small spot, so they hadn't didn't really replicate it across
cultures or ethnicities. Right, So this study was actually replicated
(38:00):
in Japan in nine and they found the same thing. Yes,
ear length still correlates with age, even when it is
corrected for height. But still there's all these alternative interpretations
that remain. So for instance, are people who are young
now when they turn old, are they also going to
(38:20):
see their ears age in the same way. Is ear
length changing and getting bigger as you get older? Is
it environmental? And if it's environmental, what could be responsible
for big years. One of the questions was literally the
idea that the people who were older at the time
that they were doing this study, when they were younger,
it was more common for their parents to box or
(38:42):
scrub their children's ears, so they thought, well, maybe that
could have affected it. I mean, my guess on the
size would just be flesh drooping effects, yeah, or something
that related to the way the ear grows, like the
inner um, the inner portions of the ear kind of
growing out the ear like a tree, like every year
he gets a new ring. Yeah. I mean, maybe that's
(39:03):
how aliens will categorize human captives that they alright, measure
the ears, see how old this one is. But heath
Cut didn't really account for any of that in his study,
So I turned to another UH analysis of this. Because
the study is over twenty years old, I looked at
Alice Sheryl Caswell's research on this for Improbable Research, so
(39:26):
the organization that puts out the ignobles. So this is
where it came about from. So Alice addresses in her paper.
First of all, the original study is very patriarchal because
it focuses on men. Now that's only in the title.
She acknowledges that the Japanese and subsequent German studies confirmed
that old women have big ears too. But I do
(39:47):
want to point out that is just poor phrasing of
the British study. It was clear that they didn't discriminate
on participants based on gender. I think they were just
using the old men term jokingly because talking about yeah,
they had based the entire study on this joke on
his hook, Yeah exactly. Now, the German study was conducted
(40:10):
in two thousand and seven, and they used photos instead
of measuring like real ears. I imagine they must have
been to scale these photos. They they used photos of
one thousand, four hundred and forty eight years and they
measured them in fifteen different ways, and they found that
female ears show a lesser increase than those of men.
(40:32):
So so far, across these three studies we've learned that yes,
people's ears grow as they get older. Yes, women's ears
also grow along with men's ears, but that it seems like,
at least in the German study, that female ears have
lesser increase. So that is really the gist of all
of these studies. I think they're awarding an older study,
(40:54):
you know, because Alice came along and was like, hey,
wait a minute, this deserves a second look. Now, why
is it funny? Well, because of the whole hook of
the whole old men have big ears thing, we all
just assume that to be true. Nobody ever thought you'd
sit down and actually measure people's ears with a ruler
or like a what do you call it, like a
tape measure or something like that. Right, but it does
(41:14):
seem to be actually important and the reason why there's
still questions to be answered. We still don't know why
ears keep going when the rest of the body stops, right,
and then the gender difference in the rate of growth
seems like that's it's something important as well, especially in
terms of just understanding human biology and anatomy. Well, you
(41:35):
know it also you have to wonder too about ear
rings and piercings and various you know, which is gonna
It's gonna vary from culture to culture. But in many
cases you're going to have more females than males using
the piercings. And is that going to increase length of
of low? And I think of about like my friends
(41:56):
in the punk scene who got like lots of ear
rings and got like big gage is placed in their
lobes and how their ears look. Now that could be
an effect as well. So there you go with some
environmental possibilities. I don't know about boxing or scrubbing though. Yeah,
so we're potentially looking though at sort of accidental body
modification of the human ear, sort of like cultural long
(42:19):
term modification. Or we're looking at at some sort of
gender dimorphism of of Homo sapiens where men end up
having longer ears over time. Yeah, I'm inclined to agree
with Joe. I mean, I haven't done the research, but
I would assume that it's similar to like why you
get bags under your eyes, right, Like over time, the
(42:40):
um facia underneath your skin just loosens and the you
know it droops basically, And so I think the ears
are probably the same, like the cartilage around the ears
stay I would imagine stays the same, but the other
stuff starts drooping down. Yeah, all right, so there you
have it. We've covered this episode the use of saltwater
(43:03):
crocodiles on problem gamblers. We've looked at facial recognition and twins,
and then the size of old man ears. So if
you have any anecdotes or maybe some of your own
research to share with us on these topics, you can
find us on Facebook. We're on Twitter, we're on tumbler,
and we're on Instagram. We've also got our fantastic Facebook
(43:25):
discussion group. Yeah, the discussion module. You can find it
on our Facebook page. That's where fans of the show
hang out, interact, talk about recent episodes, or sometimes share
potential topics with us. Yeah, and if you want to
get in touch with us directly, you want to answer
the question do your ears hang low? Do they wobble
to and fro? We want to know about that and
(43:45):
how it relates to this earloab study that Christian has
been discussing. You can email us at below the Mind
at how stuff works dot com for more on this
and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works
(44:05):
dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
And my name is Robert Lamb, I'm Christian and I'm
Joe McCormick. And hey, this is part two of our
seventeen Ignobles series. That's right. If you haven't listened to
(00:24):
the first one, I recommend that you go back at
least listen to the first twenty minutes because we set
up the stage for what ignobells are, how we've covered
them in the past before, and what we're doing here today.
This is really a continuation of us observing the prizes.
That being said, if there was ever a multipart episode
that you could just drop in at any point, it's
(00:46):
this one. This is a bag yeah, because because basically
we're just taking the ten different winners for the two
thousand seventeen Ignoble prizes, we divvy them up and we're
each like taking the lead on a different study discussing
why it's cool, why it's funny, and exactly what the signs.
In the last episode, we talked about liquid cats, cave bugs,
and digury do therapy, along with weird coffee mugs, and
(01:08):
now we're gonna get into even weirder stuff. Okay, So
the first prize we're going to discuss today is the
Economics Prize, ordered to Matthew Rocklough and Nancy Greer quote
for their experiments to see how contact with a live
crocodile affects a person's willingness to gamble. Okay, this sounds
like something out of a out of a James Bond
(01:29):
film right here. I'm imagining that this is like, I
don't know, based in Louisiana or Florida or something where
live crocodiles are a common sighting and then you may
go gambling it. Based in Australia, you can gamble and
you can handle saltwater crocodile. Right, Yeah, So the paper
is called never Smile at a crocodile. Betting on electronic
(01:50):
gaming machines is intensified by reptile induced arousal. Actually, there,
we should put an asterisk on the statement in that
title there, because that that's partially true depending on what
kind of gambler you are and some other things about you.
It was published in the Journal of Gambling Studies in
and so there are a lot of slot machines studies.
(02:11):
That the whole episode that right, and I think we
could do more. Robert and I have talked about doing
episodes entirely on rat slot machine studies or I mean,
there's just tons of research on slot machines, and there's
a reason for the slot machines or as the literature
refers to them, electronic gaming machines or e g m s.
They're kind of a perfect predator. They're like brilliantly designed
(02:35):
to exploit vulnerabilities in human psychology and risk management behavior,
gambling with e g m s tends to produce this
state of what's known as autonomic arousal. You and I
would just probably call this excitement, you know, physiological sensation
of excitement in the body that the brain tends to
interpret sometimes in the case of gambling, interprets as a
lucky streak, which keeps you gambling, and it leads to
(02:58):
this vicious cycle where it's more and more arousing and
you just keep wanting to bet more and more money.
Autonomic arousal not to be confused with reptile induced arousal. Well, no,
I mean, reptiles could create a state of aucomic arousal,
but yeah, not one and the same thing one could
lead to the other. So I think e g M
(03:18):
s are an interesting thing to study, and this kind
of research really matters because they fit into a similar category.
Uh that that I would put social media interface design
in this this successful technology design that is actually better
at its job than is good for us. What do
y'all think about that? With like social media interfaces that
(03:38):
I would say, it's a great success story in terms
of designing technology. But success doesn't necessarily mean morally good
or good for our lives. Well, I think we When
I think of a slot machine, I instantly think of
like somebody that's kind of shackled there to the machine
and they're just pushing buttons, uh, And there's this idea
that it's going to pay off for them, and then
(04:00):
maybe it does pay off a little bit, and then
they keep going. And with with social media, you do
see a some more situation. Someone has their phone out,
they're constantly checking this feed or that feed, this social
media appor that or another. And the win in this case,
I guess would be somebody contacting them directly or some
sort of response. Howbody like that I get on my
(04:22):
or you might even you might even have a real win.
You could have a meaningful interaction with somebody you care
about on social media, or you might come across an
interesting article that you're glad you read. Those are the
little winds, but maybe it just keeps you playing. After that,
we're speaking more little on our is social media making
us crazy? Episode from last year? And I think, yeah,
if I remember correctly, the literature basically assumes and they're
(04:47):
still looking into this of course that like the same
parts of our brain that are lit up by gambling
or lit up by social media. I think I think
that's a highly successful and correct analogy. Uh so for
social media interfaces that the job they're trying to achieve
generally is maximizing time on site. They want to keep
you on that platform as long as possible and keep
(05:07):
you looking at stuff and clicking on ads and all that.
Is that why we do those hour long Facebook lives
every Friday? I don't, Well, that's why Facebook wants us
doing those things. Yeah, I don't know what our reason is.
Maybe we're just slaves to the machine. But you didn't
know that. Basically, Yeah, the machine says you need to
do this, and we basically turned it around and said, Okay,
(05:28):
we'll do it, but if we're gonna do right, we'll
change it from the inside. Sure, yeah, that's what we're doing.
We're changing the machine. Man. But the electronic gaming machines,
I would put them in the same category. But instead
what they're seeking is not maximizing time on site, but
maximizing time on machine. Because when they maximize time on machine,
this tends toward infinity of losses for the player. It
(05:51):
leads to playing two extinctions industry term. Basically, the machine
getting all your cash and then making you come back
to play again when you've got more are draining the
host dry of its precious blood. So unless you want
to make gambling illegal or something, one of the best
defenses against this type of machine is for independent researchers
(06:12):
to study the psychology of gaming, basically to understand how
these machines exploit our brains, so we can build up
defense behaviors that people could employ independently to resist the machines,
or maybe so you could impose regulations on what types
of things these machines can do. Well, like what one
of the issues that we got into before was what
happens when a machine is speaking to you in a
(06:34):
human voice or using other kind of anthropomorphic forms, like
if if you were to pass a lot and says, look,
you can have slot machines, but they can't look like
beautiful women. They can't look like cartoon characters. That's they
can't be a cowboy that says, howdy, partner, put coins
in me. And that is actually a meaningful thing because
studies have shown that you might spend more money in
(06:56):
a slot machine that seems more humanoid and less mechanical.
So the tons of studies like this, there's just a
prolific slot machine research. This is one example that is
maybe the weirdest one I've ever come across, but I
like it. So Rock Lofting Career decided to study this
strange condition. What happens when you have the opportunity to
gamble on an e g M after you've just held
(07:18):
a saltwater crocodile. The so the subjects are tourists at
the Kurana Saltwater Crocodile Farm in Kowonga, Queensland, Australia. It
was a hundred and three subjects, forty one of them female,
uh ages eighteen to sixty six. And here's the experiment
under two different conditions. Subjects would be given money. They'll
(07:39):
give you twenty bucks, and then they ask you to
play a laptop simulated e g M sort of a
slot machine simulator written in visual basic on a laptop
computer where you would get to gamble with the money
they just gave you. And the two different conditions were this,
you could either play this game or right before you
walk into the crocodile farm or right after you have
(08:01):
cradled a one meter long saltwater crocodile in your hands.
So there are some independent variables going into this. Right
you've got obviously the control condition and the test condition
did you just walk in or have you handled a crocodile,
and so that is supposed to correspond to your level
of arousal. They did a galvanic skin conductance test to
to sort of check this and say, okay, we're people
(08:22):
actually showing physiological signs of arousal, and they determined yeah,
people who held crocodiles were physiologically aroused. But the other
independent variables would be problem gaming status, like do do
you have any of the risk factors for being a
problem gambler or affective state? Are you having negative feelings
right now, and so they'd established that by a questionnaire
(08:44):
UH that they administer at the time of the test,
like are you having emotions that we'd usually classify as
negative affect or positive affect? And then the deependit variables.
This is what they were seeing. Was was coming out
from those variables was bet size, how much you bet,
speed of betting, how asty bet, and final payouts like
what what's your your bottom line at the end of
(09:04):
the game. And the results they found where that compared
to people in the control group, holding a crocodile could
affect problem gamblers in a couple of different ways. If
you held a crocodile and had negative emotions, you actually
placed lower than average bets on the e g M.
So if you're somebody who's at risk for problem gambling,
(09:26):
they hand you a crocodile and you don't like it
and you have negative emotions, you'll actually it will tamp
down your problem gambling behaviors. You're less likely to spend
more interesting But if you are a problem gambler or
have these you know, risk factors for problem gambling, and
you hold a crocodile and you don't have negative feelings
about it, you actually place much higher than average bets
(09:48):
on the e g M. That's what I imagined would happen,
That there's some kind of like I held this dangerous
animal and everything turned out okay, so now I'm willing
to take more risks. Well, So here's how the researchers
interpreted it. I'll see what you guys think about this.
The way they interpreted it is that they're going on
what's known as the two factor model of effective states.
(10:10):
So the way they think affective states tend to happen
is that we first of all experience physiological arousal, like
there are feelings in the body that tell you something
of emotional significance is happening, and then secondary to that,
you cognitively think about it and give it some kind
of meaning or significance or cause. So what would happen,
(10:31):
say if, um, you suddenly a car is driving head
on at you in the highways. First you have the
feelings in your body there's some kind of arousal, and
then you use your sense data and your thoughts to
kind of say, okay, here's why that's happening. I'm afraid
because a car is coming at me um. And so
what that means, though, is that the feelings of arousal
(10:53):
in the body are not necessarily linked to their actual causes.
It's just something that we sort of figure you're out
secondary to having the feeling. And so the way that
might work in a gambler is if you do something
dangerous or something arousing, like holding a dangerous reptile, you
can you get this physiological sense of arousal. But the
(11:14):
gambler who doesn't have fear emotions really about that animal
or any other kind of negative emotions, can just interpret
that free floating arousal as a lucky streak. So it's like,
I'm pumped up by what just happened, and I'm that
means I'm good to go. Let's gamble. I'm I just
had the crocodile. I'm ready to drop some cash. Yeah,
(11:35):
it's content content free arousal that you can interpret in
any schema you want. And for the problem gambler, that
schema may very well be the feeling of luckiness or
the feeling of being on a roll. So I gotta
ask you, then, how well do you think Kenny Rogers
the gambler would do based on his crocodile experience was it.
Maybe here's the thing he maybe he was talking about
(11:56):
a crocodile. You've got to know when to hold the
crocodile and when to run. See, that would actually be
more specific. I've got issues with Kenny Rogers the Gambler
who doesn't because I think it fits into this category
of advice that is not actually specific enough to matter. There.
There's tons of advice like that out in the world.
(12:17):
You'll read these, you know, inspirational quotes. People have whole
books like this where they offer advice, but the advice
is actually completely generic. It's essentially like telling somebody you
should figure out what the right thing to do is.
It's like a fortune cookie. Yeah, and so in the
in the song, it's you've got to know when to
hold them, no, when to fold them. That's not advice.
Advice would be telling me what to judge that on,
(12:38):
Like how should I know when to hold them? Uh,
this is completely an aside. But if you want some fun,
look up the video of him performing that song on
The Muppet Show in the eighties. Now he does he
does give us some advice. You never count your money.
I want you sitting at the table that Okay, I'll
give him that. That is specific advice. I'll take that.
But you've got to know when to hold them, no
one to fold them. That's not advice, that's just generic
(13:01):
fortune teller stuff. But anyway, I wanted to come back
to the study because there are some masterisks we should
put on this. Number one is I want to clarify
that this only seemed to be the case for problem gamblers,
So like holding the crocodile, just for normal people who
do who did not have these risk factors for being
a problem gambler, did not seem to intensify betting, and uh,
(13:23):
like these would be people for whom gambling is not
a novel experience, but maybe holding a crocodile is, whereas
from for me, holding a crocodile is the novel experience,
as is using a slot machine. Right, so you you
probably would not place higher bets or or have intensified
gambling or reward seeking behaviors after holding a crocodile, or likewise,
(13:45):
somebody who had a strict rule like, yeah, I play
the slot machines when I go to the casino, but
I only spend five dollars and once that's gone. I'm done,
and I never break that rule. Right. Yeah, So people
who don't exhibit these behaviors, this doesn't apply to them.
It does seem to apply to people who are risk
for problem gambling. But there is a limitation to the study.
Essentially that they did not have a lot of people
(14:06):
in their sample group who showed problem gambling behaviors or
or risk factors. So one thing would be that they
should probably try to replicate this to have more confidence
in the in the result with a larger sample group
that has more problem gamblers, and it just to make
sure that they're getting a real effect and this isn't
just noise. Now. Remember also, the thing is that even
among the problem gamblers, it was only when you don't
(14:28):
have any negative moods or negative feelings about holding the
crocodile that it leads to these intensified behaviors. If you
have these negative moods, you report it actually kind of
seems to moderate your gambling behavior. And so that sets
up this quote I want to read from the paper.
Quote in some low intensity negative moods, such as boredom
or mild anxiety, contribute to large bets among at risk players.
(14:53):
Whereas high autonomic arousal without negative moods also produces relatively
large wagers. Taken together, the results suggest that betting among
at risk players may be motivated both by attempts to
alleviate low arousal dysphoric moods and by high arousal induced
positive expectations of winning money. Yeah, totally. This lines up
(15:16):
with the social media thing as well. I think, yeah,
that makes sense. So it's like when you when you're
a problem gambler and you participate in these gambling behaviors,
it seems you may be trying to counteract basically like
low level unpleasantness and seeking high arousal, high reward pleas
you know, high high pleasure interactions. Right, But if you're
(15:37):
like absolutely in the pits emotionally, you're probably not going
to be likely to gamble as much as that the
person who's just sort of low level and happy, right,
a little bit anxious, a little bit bored, that's the
target show. Yeah, So what's the what what's the overall
takeaway from this? Is there any kind of crocodile based
regulation that might be employed to help problem gambling? Well,
(15:58):
I wouldn't say crocodile based. I mean, I think it.
Studies like this actually do matter, like that, this is
the kind of thing that can help us understand the
psychological states that lead to problem gambling and can help
people either individually can help people come up with strategies
to avoid problem gambling behaviors if they know, like, Okay,
here's the state I'm in when I'm vulnerable. I know
(16:19):
when I'm in that state, I should, uh, you know,
not be around electronic gaming machines or something like that.
Like you can devise behaviors to protect yourself from your
own impulses, or you could also devise regulations on society,
like if we find out that in general, people are
just much more susceptible to electronic gaming machines under certain
(16:41):
psychological conditions, you could try to keep gaming machines from
being around in places where you would expect people to
be in those conditions. Or you end up you end
up having just like some sort of a B S
question that pops up on the screen. Uh, please write
your depression level and if you and if you and
if you ad it too appropriately, then it won't let
(17:02):
you play right, And then you do it again and
you just click the number that's required, like an age gate.
They have a test in the machine to see if
you're okay or you having kind of like no, no
real strong negative emotions, but experiencing high arousal. I don't
know how you test for that, but but if you
detect that, it's like you better not gamble right now.
(17:22):
I mean, if you wanted to do it physiologically, you
could actually do a galvanic skin conductance test, you know,
like you could test for arousal with a physical test
and not a questionnaire. Yeah, I can see that, you like,
put your arm into a cuff of some sort and test.
It's like you're too aroused. You can't, can't play right now.
But then you come back to the again, to the
the question, how much energy, how much effort, how much
(17:44):
design are slot machine makers going to be willing to
put into you know, basically protecting the host organs? Well,
of course, I mean when we did our last slot
machine episode, we had somebody right in who worked for
a gaming design company and they were like, you know,
I think you you were a little too harsh on us.
You were a little too negative about slot machines. You know,
(18:05):
I don't want to demonize them too much, because I
can understand, like, under plenty of conditions, they might just
be a fun thing people do, Like if they've got
certain limits on how much they bet, it might just
be a cool recreational activity. I don't have a problem
with that, but I think we should recognize that certain
people have conditions that make them vulnerable to this and
that can be incredibly destructive in their lives. Well, I
(18:27):
think one of the things that we observed in that
episode is that the origins of the slot machine were
very mundane and fun. It was about, uh, administering a
prize in a simple game, not unlike you know, like
a trivia machine or something in bars today. But the machine,
as machines do, uh, they they evolved, They took on
(18:49):
more advanced forms, they were designed to take on more
advanced forms. They became better and better at at carrying
out their their key bit of programming, which was, you know,
drain the sucker of its coin, the original Facebook algorithm.
Have you guys noticed this trend in video games lately
when you're in like an immersive world video game, that
there is almost always a gambling component to it, Like
(19:12):
if you're in like Skyrim you can gamble. If you're
in Red Dead Redemption, you can gamble. I'm trying to
remember what the most recent one. Oh, the Witcher. I
was playing one of those Witcher games. It's like, everywhere
you go you can sit down and gamble. I would
say that the games like that incorporate gambling elements even
outside of the gaming within the gaming things. So in
a lot of these games, you can walk up to
a slot machine and play it, or you can play cards,
(19:34):
but also when you're in the world, there are variable
reward payouts where, for example, if your achievements yeah yeah,
you know, you might kill certain enemies or something, and
they've got goodies they give you when you loot them,
and you notice you don't get the same thing every time.
It's not guaranteed. It's variable payouts, just like a slot machine,
(19:54):
and the variable payouts are a psychological hack. The variable
payouts make us think like, oh, it could be really
big next time. I'm gonna keep doing it. That's what
leads to grinding and video games. Yeah, yeah, I think
I wonder though, if there's something about the actual placing
of gambling into those games that psychologically gets players to
play longer. Yeah, I think that could very well be.
(20:16):
All right. On that note, we're going to take a
break and when we come back, we're going to jump
into the Cognition prize. Alright, we're back cognition. You say,
what have we got here? We have a paper titled
is that Me or My Twin? Lack of self face
recognition advantage in identical Twins. I saw this and as
(20:38):
we were doing the research for this yesterday a headline
popped up that was related to this. Apparently, Uh, you know,
when your phone does facial recognition as a way to unlock,
like as as a password, it has trouble with identical twins. Yeah,
so I wonder if what you're about to reveal to
us is related in a way. In a way, So,
(20:59):
this is a paper that came out in and it's
from a an Italian and Spanish team and it was
published in p Los one it. Uh, Before we get
into it, I do want to just touch basically on
the idea of identical twins. And uh, we've had some
episodes in the past. I've dealt with twins a little bit,
but I don't know, like I can't remember we've done
(21:20):
a deep dive. I know that we have some identical
twins out there listening to the show. I know that
we have parents of identical twins, siblings of identical twins, etcetera.
For a lot of us, though, our main point of
reference for identical twins ends up being fiction because how
many of example, how many examples can you think of of,
like weird twins or twins with a paranormal link. Yeah,
(21:43):
it's played up for the uncanny nous. I mean they
push it to creepy links and things like The Shining
or Dead Ringers. Yeah. Uh, and I and I say this,
I mean I have written stories about creepy twins before,
because they it does become a useful way of examining yourself,
examining identity, uh, at least if you're out an outside
(22:03):
or if you're not an identical twin. Likewise, I'm glad
you mentioned dead Ringers because you also see it used
over and over again in films. Sometimes it feels like
just pure actor or director vanity, Like let's have this
actor play two characters. Why have one James Franco when
you can have to James Franco is playing slightly different
James Franco twins. Yeah, yeah, I immediately thought of that.
(22:31):
That recent movie about the Crab Brothers legend where Tom
Hardy plays both the oh yeah, he plays he plays
identical twins. Uh. There was the recent Fargo season they
had identical twins played by the same actor. It's done
so many times that you get tired of it after
a while, unless there's a really compelling reason to have
identical twins played by single actor. I just got to
(22:53):
throw in that one of my favorite words in all
of science is the word for identical twins, the monozygotic twins. Yeah,
the monosygotic twinka. It is utilized in this paper quite
a bit now on top of so so basically it
comes down to the idea that for us non twins,
identical twins are a way to unravel ourselves. They perplex
(23:15):
us and they toy with our sense of self perception.
And as the researchers on this, uh, this paper, this
two thousand fIF paper point out, science has generally overlooked
the conundrum of self facial recognition in identical twins. We
have a lot of twin studies out there, but there
hasn't been a lot of papers that have looked at.
What happens when an identical twin looks at a photograph
(23:38):
or image of representation of their own face. Do they
experience some kind of cognitive dissonance? Yeah, because consider for
for the for the rest of us, for those of
us who are not identical twins. Um, self facial recognition
is is a major thing, and it may be a
cognitive prerequisite for theory of mind, our ability to imagine
(24:00):
the mind state of others. Because just think of all
the times you've looked in a mirror, you've taken a selfie,
or if you've looked at a picture of yourself and
you think, ah, who's that handsome devil? You know? And
then you answer that question, you you tell yourself who
that handsome devil is? Yeah? Why why is he making
a smile like that? What's that twinkle in his eyes? Um,
it's the evil twin? Well, you know, I'm I'm painting
(24:21):
in in in shades of vanity here, But there's a
there's a basic cognitive process that's going on when you
do that. You are identifying yourself and thinking about who
you are. Well, I mean people respond in hilarious, obsessive
ways to their own reflection when you notice it, like, uh,
you know, there's a reason that a lot of places
will put mirrors near elevators where people need to wait
(24:43):
for things. People just time flies. When you're looking in
a mirror, you can obsessively gaze into this image, right,
rather than worry about the people that are next to
you in the elevator. Yeah, and there's a there's a
similar uh, cognitive process going on when you look at
any face. You look at a loved one's face, you
look at a stranger's face. There's still this theory of
(25:05):
mind exercise that's going on. And what you're saying, who
is that handsome devil or who is that person with
you know, some brarow on, you know, whatever the case
may be, You're looking at the face and you're trying
to figure out who they are, at least insofar as
it relates to you. I've had like the opposite experience
with this, and I don't want to take us too
far off track, but when I used to ride the train,
(25:29):
the windows on the train were curved in such a
way that when you saw your own reflection in it,
your face was distorted a little bit, and it would
look like my forehead had ridges or something, or like
it was just it's kind of like a fun house mirror,
and I'm yeah, clings, that was exactly what it looked
like to me. Yeah, and uh, it was fascinating. I
would sit there and look at it for for the
(25:51):
whole ride and just kind of wonderment, like what if
I actually did look like that? You know. So there
is a weird sort of obsessiveness with our own uh reflection,
but also like just a slight variation on it. Yeah,
I mean, I think you see this in in skype
calls and FaceTime calls where everyone's looking at their own
picture instead of the camera. Maybe they're looking at other
(26:13):
people's pictures. I noticed it with my son because he's
just when I when I put him on FaceTime calls
with relatives, he's just captivated by the own little, the
little version of his own face, and he's not even
thinking about the call, much less someone on the other line.
And this underlines a basic reality. Our own face grabs
and retains attention longer than any other face out there, uh,
(26:36):
you know, loved one, stranger, etcetera. And this, according to
the researchers, occurs with both upright and inverted faces. So
we process upright faces faster usually, but we also have
the similar process that goes on when the face is
upside down. In fact, our ability to recognize our own
face holds true even in cases of severe face blindness,
(27:00):
accept in cases of just really catastrophic neurological or psychiatric disorder.
Another fun word the term there, I guess would be
auto prosopagnosia. Prosopagnosia is face blindness. Yes, so even in
cases of severe face blindness, again, your own face is
still going to um have a special place in uh
in in facial recognition. Okay, but there is a So
(27:23):
what we're getting at here is with the twins in particular,
they lack the ability to recognize their own face. And
these these twins that have a similar face to them, well,
I mean basically it comes comes down to the fact
that it's going to mess with this system because the
basic fact here is that if you have an identical twin,
(27:43):
then looking at your own face, looking at a representation
of your own face, it's not instantly going to be
your face. It could be your twins face. And and
so we're looking at this to see like what's different
without identical twins, and then what this reveals about our
own about everyone else's facial recognition process. Now, there are
a few other factors you have to take into account, so, uh,
(28:06):
self face processing is a right hemisphere um exercise, and
it's impaired in individuals with schizotypal traits. Also, extroverts, who
typically have better social skills, they recognize a higher number
of faces than introverts. Lower face recognition is associated with
increased social phobia. So in all of this, personality plays
(28:29):
a role in facial recognition as well, twin or not.
So this is good because it gives me a reason
to explain to my wife why I mix up like
actors and actresses all the time, because she's like, you
just think everybody looks alike, and well, no, it's because
actually I have lower face recognition because of my increased
social phobia. So, given all of of what we've discussed
(28:52):
so far, uh monosa gottic twins they pose an interesting
exception to the uniqueness of the self face because again,
when we see a representation of our own face, we
instantly know who that is. There's no room for doubt,
and the idea here with an identical twin, there's going
to be at least a little room for doubt, you know. Granted,
(29:15):
if one has an evil goatee or something, it's gonna
throw things out the window a bit. But for the
most part, uh, this is this is interesting to look
at because it turns things on its on there on
its head a little bit. So. Past predictions have been
made related to this that twins might have trouble with
self identification as they identify more as a duo. Also,
(29:37):
identical twins might sometimes mistake photos of their twin or
their self. That's been the previous thinking on this. Also,
another past study indicated that while humans can you usually
identify themselves in a mirror by age two, uh, you,
there have been cases where two year old twins discriminate
their own faces from the face of their co twins
only of exposed to the facial stimuli for a longer
(29:59):
period of time, So there might be a delay at least.
And studies have looked at young twins and their ability
to work out these faces. But prior to this study,
no one had really looked at the ability of adult
twins to tell their faces apart. Okay, so what do
we find out all right. Well, basically, the the overall
aim of the paper, according to them is quote in
(30:20):
the light of these premises, the main objective of the
present study was to examine at both configural that's based
on the whole face and featural that's based on details
of the face processing levels, whether despite their physical similarity,
twins would be better at recognizing their own face compared
to their co twin faces. So what they did is
(30:40):
they presented groups of twins with upright and inverted images
of their faces, those of a twin and a control
image of a non twin, so just some other person.
They used tin monosygonic right handed gender balanced healthy twin
couples that's the exact wording from the paper, and tin
right handed gender balanced healthy controls all white Caucasians in Rome,
(31:06):
where they where the study was held, and the control
participants the non twins. Using the study for balance, they
were matched with sex matched close friends or relatives, all
people they've known at least three years, so there'd be
a level of familiarity. This resulted in two days of tests.
First they did personality tests, then they did the facial tests,
and these were the results. Identical twins they said, seem
(31:28):
to lack the self identification advantage. However, the absence of
the self advantage depends on how much the twins report
that they physically resemble each other. Okay, so adult twins
can't pick themselves out of a lineup as easily as
most adults can, but this is mitigated by whether they
look all that much like their identical twin. Right, Yeah,
(31:52):
I want to drive home that it is. We're not
saying that twins can't tell each other apart in there,
but that there is not basically not as easily. It
also depends on their anxious and avoid an attachment style.
And they found out that quote self and co twin
faces share very similar featural, configural and matching processes, but
(32:13):
differ with respect to the higher order stages of face processing.
So this is a study. Honestly, there's so many studies
that the Igno Bell covers that I'm like, yeah, that's
of course that the nobles chose that one or their
studies that come out and you're like, oh, I can't
wait till they feature this one. They give this one,
they need noble prize. I I honestly didn't see what
(32:33):
was that funny about this one is Yeah, it seems
like right exactly. I guess maybe it's the idea of
looking at your own face upside down again, Like if
we had watched the ceremony this year, I imagine they
would have done some kind of visual gag or whatever
you know, related to this specifics. But it doesn't seem
to have an inherent gag quality to it. There's no
(32:55):
crocodile being held already using a gambling machine. There's a
liquid cats. Yeah, so it's I have trouble figuring out.
I mean, I'm glad they highlighted it. It's a case
where yeah, it's a cool study and I'm glad more
eyes are on it because it does it is important. Uh.
The take home here is again not that twins are
freaky or anything. Rather, we're looking at a slight tweaking
(33:15):
of the basic visual, safe self faced recognition, and it
illuminates what's going on in all of us now. The
researchers also argue that their findings match up with the
self referrent phenotype matching theory that we recognize our kin
by implicitly or explicitly comparing the similarity of other people's
appearance to our own. So that's another potential takeome from
(33:37):
the from the study. And again, I know we have
some identical twins out there, We have parents of identical twins,
family members and friends of identical twins. We would obviously
love to hear from all of you about this particular paper,
and we'd like to hear from evil twins as well. Yeah,
evil twins jump in. All right, let's take one more break,
and when we get back, I'm going to talk to
you guys about big years. Alright, we're back. This potato
(34:02):
has big ears. Oh that's interesting that you went there.
So there is actually a variety of slang around the
world for talking about big ears, whether it's potatoes. Yeah,
well no, but in the UK, Uh, they are sometimes
called bat ears. I had not heard that before, or
(34:22):
wing nut, which I thought wing nut was a completely
different thing. I assume that this is talking about big
ears on humans, not on other animals. Yeah, yeah, uh.
And Hindus seem to find big ears desirable because of
comparisons to the elephant god Ganesha. The French compare big
ears to cabbage, Hungarians compare them to donkey ears, and
(34:43):
the Polish compare them to pig ears. Now, this is interesting.
The Chinese believe that long ears predict prosperity and longevity.
And this is the most important to this paper that
I'm about to present to you and its purposes. I
also want to say, all of those like statements about
various societies around the world, I didn't look that up
that came out of this original paper here. This is
(35:06):
yet another Ignoble winner. It is the Anatomy Prize winner
for the article why do you old men have big ears? Oh? Man?
Because it's true? Right? It turns out it is true,
but it's this is why it's funny, right. The idea
is that it's one of these things that we all assume,
but it does turn out that there's there's some reality
(35:27):
to it. They've done lots of measurements, so let's get
into it. I'm trying to picture pig ears and I
can't what a pig ears look like. Oh, they're they're
big and flopped. Well, sometimes they're floppy, It depends on
the pig. Yeah. Oh, they're kind of like dog ear,
they're kind of like pit bull ears. Yeah yeah. Um.
So the idea for this paper actually came about this way.
(35:49):
Nineteen members of the Thames Faculty of the Royal College
of General Practitioners. We're just sitting around brainstorming and the
first question that came up to them was why do
we old men have big ears? And then they realized
they were like, well, wait a minute, actually, we need
to confirm that old men's ears are bigger and they
get bigger in the first place. So this study was
(36:10):
conducted by Dr James A. Heath Cut and he was
a general practitioner in Bromley at the time. This is
in the nineties. The paper was published in So they
asked routine patients who were coming in for surgery consultations
if it was okay if they measured their ears as
part of this research along with it. When the group
(36:32):
was thirty plus years old, from either sex and from
any racial group that came in. Interestingly, none refused. Everybody
was cool, measure my ears. This sounds fun and they
recorded this along with the patient's age, and at this
time they got two hundred and six people to participate in.
The study showed that as these participants got older, their
(36:54):
ears grew on an average of point to two millimeters
a year. What the study didn't explain is why ears
keep growing when the rest of the body stops. That
seems to be odd, right. The thing about this study
is it doesn't explain another thing. What if you're a
taller person and like Robert, Robert is taller than I am.
(37:17):
Robert's taller than Joe. So what if Robert has longer
ears simply because he's taller, and then as he gets older?
You know, so there's some discrepancies that they didn't really
fill in here with you long legs, big ears, yeah,
and well, and plus when you get older, you're gonna
be more stooped over, whereas the ears are not going
to get stooped over to go. So I could see
(37:37):
that being the illusion of like, oh, this this old person,
they're shrinking except for their ears, which there's there's no
limited sight. Yeah. Uh. And they also didn't answer, for instance,
like all of the elderly people that they checked their ears,
they were all English because they're all in this one
small spot, so they hadn't didn't really replicate it across
cultures or ethnicities. Right, So this study was actually replicated
(38:00):
in Japan in nine and they found the same thing. Yes,
ear length still correlates with age, even when it is
corrected for height. But still there's all these alternative interpretations
that remain. So for instance, are people who are young
now when they turn old, are they also going to
(38:20):
see their ears age in the same way. Is ear
length changing and getting bigger as you get older? Is
it environmental? And if it's environmental, what could be responsible
for big years. One of the questions was literally the
idea that the people who were older at the time
that they were doing this study, when they were younger,
it was more common for their parents to box or
(38:42):
scrub their children's ears, so they thought, well, maybe that
could have affected it. I mean, my guess on the
size would just be flesh drooping effects, yeah, or something
that related to the way the ear grows, like the
inner um, the inner portions of the ear kind of
growing out the ear like a tree, like every year
he gets a new ring. Yeah. I mean, maybe that's
(39:03):
how aliens will categorize human captives that they alright, measure
the ears, see how old this one is. But heath
Cut didn't really account for any of that in his study,
So I turned to another UH analysis of this. Because
the study is over twenty years old, I looked at
Alice Sheryl Caswell's research on this for Improbable Research, so
(39:26):
the organization that puts out the ignobles. So this is
where it came about from. So Alice addresses in her paper.
First of all, the original study is very patriarchal because
it focuses on men. Now that's only in the title.
She acknowledges that the Japanese and subsequent German studies confirmed
that old women have big ears too. But I do
(39:47):
want to point out that is just poor phrasing of
the British study. It was clear that they didn't discriminate
on participants based on gender. I think they were just
using the old men term jokingly because talking about yeah,
they had based the entire study on this joke on
his hook, Yeah exactly. Now, the German study was conducted
(40:10):
in two thousand and seven, and they used photos instead
of measuring like real ears. I imagine they must have
been to scale these photos. They they used photos of
one thousand, four hundred and forty eight years and they
measured them in fifteen different ways, and they found that
female ears show a lesser increase than those of men.
(40:32):
So so far, across these three studies we've learned that yes,
people's ears grow as they get older. Yes, women's ears
also grow along with men's ears, but that it seems like,
at least in the German study, that female ears have
lesser increase. So that is really the gist of all
of these studies. I think they're awarding an older study,
(40:54):
you know, because Alice came along and was like, hey,
wait a minute, this deserves a second look. Now, why
is it funny? Well, because of the whole hook of
the whole old men have big ears thing, we all
just assume that to be true. Nobody ever thought you'd
sit down and actually measure people's ears with a ruler
or like a what do you call it, like a
tape measure or something like that. Right, but it does
(41:14):
seem to be actually important and the reason why there's
still questions to be answered. We still don't know why
ears keep going when the rest of the body stops, right,
and then the gender difference in the rate of growth
seems like that's it's something important as well, especially in
terms of just understanding human biology and anatomy. Well, you
(41:35):
know it also you have to wonder too about ear
rings and piercings and various you know, which is gonna
It's gonna vary from culture to culture. But in many
cases you're going to have more females than males using
the piercings. And is that going to increase length of
of low? And I think of about like my friends
(41:56):
in the punk scene who got like lots of ear
rings and got like big gage is placed in their
lobes and how their ears look. Now that could be
an effect as well. So there you go with some
environmental possibilities. I don't know about boxing or scrubbing though. Yeah,
so we're potentially looking though at sort of accidental body
modification of the human ear, sort of like cultural long
(42:19):
term modification. Or we're looking at at some sort of
gender dimorphism of of Homo sapiens where men end up
having longer ears over time. Yeah, I'm inclined to agree
with Joe. I mean, I haven't done the research, but
I would assume that it's similar to like why you
get bags under your eyes, right, Like over time, the
(42:40):
um facia underneath your skin just loosens and the you
know it droops basically, And so I think the ears
are probably the same, like the cartilage around the ears
stay I would imagine stays the same, but the other
stuff starts drooping down. Yeah, all right, so there you
have it. We've covered this episode the use of saltwater
(43:03):
crocodiles on problem gamblers. We've looked at facial recognition and twins,
and then the size of old man ears. So if
you have any anecdotes or maybe some of your own
research to share with us on these topics, you can
find us on Facebook. We're on Twitter, we're on tumbler,
and we're on Instagram. We've also got our fantastic Facebook
(43:25):
discussion group. Yeah, the discussion module. You can find it
on our Facebook page. That's where fans of the show
hang out, interact, talk about recent episodes, or sometimes share
potential topics with us. Yeah, and if you want to
get in touch with us directly, you want to answer
the question do your ears hang low? Do they wobble
to and fro? We want to know about that and
(43:45):
how it relates to this earloab study that Christian has
been discussing. You can email us at below the Mind
at how stuff works dot com for more on this
and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works
(44:05):
dot com
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