The influence of the Ig Nobel Prize slowly seeps into academia — especially in techniques for piquing people’s curiosity and attention. Here’s a new, 2023 example. The Harvard Gazette, in a report headlined “The snappy book talk: ‘When does that happen in academia?’ ” tells of an innovative event: “Scholars had seven minutes to explain […]
John Senders, 2011 Ig Nobel Prize winner (for his 1960’s experiment in which he drove an automobile on a on a major highway while a visor repeatedly flapped down over his face, blinding him) gets some new attention for his doctoral thesis, which is not as well known as as the driving experiment. The new […]
The whether and when and how often of cats possibly paying attention to their owners is the main thing in this week’s Improbable Research podcast. Oh, and lots of Jean Berko Gleason and her cat, Foster. SUBSCRIBE on Play.it, iTunes, or Spotify to get a new episode every week, free. This week, Marc Abrahams — with dramatic readings by Boston University psychologist Jean Berko Gleason — […]
Attn. museum curators! If you were to ask your visitors to lift heavy weights whilst looking at exhibits, would their esthetic pleasure and appreciative comprehension increase? A recent study, published in frontiers in Psychology suggests that ‘Weight lifting can facilitate appreciative comprehension for museum exhibits’. A research team from Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan, asked 42 […]