Athletes like those who won medals at the recent Winter Olympics train intensely for their sport. When most of us think of training, we probably think only of physical exercise, but winning athletes also need to master the mental challenges of competition, which can be especially intense during the Olympic games. After all, the world is watching and nothing short of national pride is on the line.
Listen to the short sound pieces in this New York Times interactive graphic and you'll realize that the distance between winners and losers at the Olympic games is often less than an instant. Being mentally focused and prepared can make all the difference. To help them train, many athletes (including all of the US team) work with Sports Psychologists, mental health experts who help them to prepare for the distraction of crowds and the pressure of the moment. What does mental training involve? Athletes complete exercises in visualization, breathing, body control, and energy management to help them focus so they don't choke under pressure.
What about the mental implications of winning and losing? Psychologists (and economists!) who are interested in knowing more about what makes people happy have used the Olympic games as a kind of laboratory - looking at athletes who take first place and comparing them to those who don't.
As you might guess, winning a Gold medal feels pretty good, and athletes who take first seem to be pretty happy about it. But scientists found an unexpected result in their study on winning, losing, and happiness when they compared silver and bronze medalists - it seems that third place finishers are, on average, happier than those who come in second. Researchers learned this by watching interviews with Olympic athletes at the 1992 summer games and recording words and phrases that they used to describe how they were feeling. They also watched recordings of the facial expressions of the athletes on the podium, and concluded that while most Bronze medalists looked giddy, Silver medalists often seemed disappointed.
Why would you be happier with a third place title than second? Researchers point to a phenomenon called "counterfactual thinking" - in short, it means those in second place are plagued by thoughts of "what might have been" while bronze medalists are relieved that they placed at all. Second place finishers are thinking of the one tiny mistake that cost them first place, while third place finishers are relieved that they didn't make one mistake too many.
This phenomenon is not exclusive to Olympic athletes. We all compete in one sense or another, and have all probably dealt with moments of winning and losing, which is probably part of why we enjoy watching sports games.
Click here for more Buzz stories on science and the Winter Olympics.
Tags : Shipwreck ettiquette – Titanic vs. Lusitania: Which ship had the more polite men?
We just said bon voyage to the Titanic exhibit here at the Science Museum of Minnesota, but I came across this very interesting article about male behavior patterns when ships are sinking. Researchers have analyzed the behaviors of men on board Titanic (which sank in about three hours) and men on board Lusitania (which sank in 18 minutes). Which ship saw more "gentlemanly" behavior? Think about it and then read the results of the research findings right here.
You're getting sleepy...sleepy!: Subjects in the University of Hull hypnosis study were asked to imagine a non-existent cat. This isn't it. Or is it?
Courtesy rKnightA new study out of the University of Hull in Great Britain shows a person’s brain displays visible changes while under hypnosis.
Hypnosis has been around for a long time and used by professionals to help people reduce stress or pain, eliminate phobias, quit smoking, lose weight, and for just general relaxation. It’s also used as entertainment.
We’ve all seen the classic routine of volunteers in a trance running around on stage clucking like chickens. Or where somebody suddenly jumps up to dance like Pee Wee Herman when the song “Tequila” starts playing. Or where some poor fool thinks he or she is suddenly buck-naked on stage when the hypnotist utters a “trigger” word or phrase such as “monkey wrench”.
Some folks are easily hypnotized, others aren’t. When I still smoked, I had my doctor use hypnosis to help me stop (I don’t know that it worked – I still smoked after that although I did quit several years later so maybe the hypnosis planted something in my brain). In the past, I’ve volunteered at hypnosis stage shows I’ve attended but never seemed to get picked as a malleable subject. Like me you may considered myself unsusceptible to hypnosis but I believe we’ve all experienced hypnotic states when lost in music, or when driving, or just zoned out in front of the television. It’s as if the conscious brain shifts into neutral and the subconscious takes over.
In the Hull University study, researchers compared the brainwaves of ten “highly suggestible” (i.e. easily hypnotized) individuals against those of seven individuals who had low response to hypnosis. All the test subjects were asked to perform minor tasks such as “seeing” non-existent animals, or “listening” to non-existent music. During rest period between tasks brainwaves were carefully tracked using functional magnetic imaging (fMRI).
It was in these rest periods where the brains of the highly suggestible subjects showed decreased activity in the region where daydreaming or mind wandering occurred. The other group’s brains showed no such change at those times. The results give credence to the theory that hypnosis acts as a primer for individuals susceptible to suggestion.
“Our study shows that hypnosis is real,” said Dr William McGeown, a psychologist at Hull, and the study’s lead researcher. “It corresponds to a unique pattern of brain activation which was not observed in any other experimental condition and was not seen in people who were not hypnotizable.”
Results of the study were published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition.
Hull University press release
More about hypnosis
And even more about hypnosis
Stay sober, stay stimulated: Stay off sensory deprivation! Oh... wait... that wasn't the point of the study?
Courtesy mikebairdStay in school, little dudes. That’s important. Also, stay off drugs. That’s also important.
Why? Because school embiggens your brain. And because drugs interfere with the brain embiggening process. Your uppers, your downers, your sliders, your narcotics, your kool-aid/cough syrup concoctions, your hallucinogens… they’re all dangerous, they will all keep you from focusing your brainwaves and chi and stuff.
But it’s easy avoiding those effects, right? The secret is to just not do drugs, right?
Wrong! Just 15 minutes of sensory deprivation can trigger hallucination! That’s just you and your brain, alone together in a totally quiet and dark room, making each other craaaaazy!
200 participants were given a questionnaire to determine how prone each person was to hallucinations. 9 of the highest scorers (that is, they had a high propensity for hallucination) and 10 of the lowest scorers (the least likely to hallucinate) were then (after volunteering) placed individually into an anechoic chamber. The anechoic chamber is build to muffle as much external sound as possible, and there’s no light inside, so once the participants were shut inside, they were in complete darkness and silence for the 15-minute duration of the test.
The study found:
“Of the nine volunteers who had high scores on the first questionnaire, almost all reported experiencing something "very special or important" while inside the chamber. Six saw objects that were not there, five had hallucinations of faces, four reported a heightened sense of smell, and two felt there was an evil presence in the chamber with them.”
Even the participants who scored low on the first test experienced hallucinations and delusions, although not as heavily as the first group.
The research seems to support the idea that hallucinations (or some hallucinations) are caused by the brain misidentifying its own thoughts and activity as something that comes from outside the body. So… you bring your crazy with you into the sensory deprivation chamber, I guess.
You hear that kids? If you’re not careful, and, like, accidentally fall into a sensory depravation chamber, your straightedge lifestyle will suddenly count for nothing! And you won’t get into your favorite ivy-league college, you little junky, you. So, whatever you do, stay stimulated! And if you ever do get trapped in an anechoic chamber, try to create your own sensory experiences until help arrives. I can't recommend whistling, because you’ll need your mouth for the arm-licking that I do recommend. But I think you should be able to hum and lick your arm at the same time, so do that. And, if you’re able, fart like crazy. With all this stimuli, you should be able to maintain some level of sobriety until a fireman axes the box open to find you sanely humming, licking your arm, and farting.
The more you know. You know?
Feed me! Love me! Return my lost wallet!: Wallets containing pictures of babies were more likely to be returned.
Courtesy Alex Motrenko
They inspire people to return missing wallets. Scientists in Scotland deliberately placed wallets on the streets in Edinburgh to to see how many would be returned. Most of the wallets contained a photo—a baby, a puppy, a family portrait, or a photo of an elderly couple. Some wallets had no photos, but a charity receipt. And still others had nothing beyond name and address. None of the wallets contained any money.
In all, 42& of the wallets were returned. Those with baby pictures came back most often, 88% of the time. The puppy dog picture triggered an honest response in 53% of the finders; the family photo 48%; and the elderly couple photo only 28%. (I take this as evidence that Scots don't like old people.) Bringing up the rear were the wallets with the charity receipt (20%) and the ones with nothing special at all (15%).
Professor Richard Wiseman, the psychologist who ran the experiment, said the results demonstrate that humans are hard-wired with an instinct for compassion and want to protect vulnerable infants. This no doubt inspires us to protect future generations, but it's a raw deal if you ain't cute.
Now, these are Brad Pitt's eyes: Or... no, maybe not. I'm not certain.
Courtesy myrmicianI’ll save you the anxiety of guessing and the effort of researching—it’s the third one. Or maybe psychology grad students really are good at Photoshop, and I simply can’t stand pictures of Bradbrad that have been adulterated in any way.
JGordon, what are you talking about?
Aahh, I don’t even know anymore. But I guess I’m referring to this study that recently came out of Vanderbilt University, about how we recognize human faces. It turns out that while we identify most stuff (cars are given as an example in the article) by individual features, individual humans are identified by the whole collection of facial features.
Holistic recognition (the way we see faces) is nice because we can quickly distinguish between lots of individuals. But the reason we’re able to do it so well, say the scientists, is because we associate names with faces, individuating them as we learn them. This is a different mental path than identifying something by individual parts.
Basically, we don’t identify people by thinking “Let’s see… square jaw, pointy nose, thin eyebrows, small ears… ah! That’s David!” And if we had learned to identify people that way, we would have to relearn to identify them holistically by all their features at once, because the two methods of identification aren’t really linked.
Or something. Like I said, I don’t really know what I’m talking about.
The scientists did, however, attempt to illustrate their point with this picture of actor Brad Pitt. The idea is as follows:
“See this picture of Brad Pitt?”
“Yes, I see that picture of Brad Pitt. Very nice.”
“Are you sure? Take a closer look.”
“What on Earth are you… Oh my goodness! The eyes! Those are Matt Damon’s eyes! Well, I never!”
“Yes, those are Matt Damon’s eyes! But you didn’t look at the eyes and say, ‘This is Matt Damon,’ did you?”
“No indeed!”
Except, if you’re anything like JGordon, you looked at that picture and thought, “What happened to Brad Pitt? Has Angelina Jolie been hitting him? Does he have eyeball parasites?” And you were so distracted by this that any future mention of psychology was overwhelmed by your concern for Benjamin Button himself. He’s only a child, after all.
Eh. Anyway, your photo project looks crazy, Vanderbilt.
Whatever.
Courtesy KabiesToday’s extravaganza, dear Buzzketeers, is a journey of self-discovery.
Don’t worry. There are quizzes involved.
So how about it kids? What makes you hurl?
What gets your motor running, and then makes it blurt chunky oil everywhere?
What’s your poison? Are you a bread ‘n butter, rats and roaches gal? Ketchup and icecream? Centipedes running though the kitchen? What about the thought of spiders, under your sheets at night, exploring you, perhaps finding their way to the warm cavern of your open mouth…
Or are you repulsed by dark glimpses of the other side (of being alive). The swollen and splitting stomach of a road killed dear? Maggots on the trash? A misplaced kneecap? …Brains?
What about the constant hacking, mucus-laden noises of your classmate? A prolonged embrace from an aunt who smells so strongly of… something? The firm, dry handshake of a Canadian?
(I don’t mean to offend Canadians here. I only used them as an example because they are so universally well liked that no one would assume I was being serious. Please, substitute whichever group of people you personally revile.)
Yes, today is the day of disgust. It smells like bile and puss, it sounds like nails on a chalkboard, it feels like the movement of tiny, alien legs on your skin, and it looks like Kuato from Total Recall. And it’s pretty interesting.
Basic elements of disgust are pretty easy to understand. In general, we’re pretty grossed out by the sorts of things that, should they find their way into our bodies somehow, could make us ill. Rotten food, some insects, etc. But then we’re also sometimes disgusted by groups of people or behaviors that pose no threat of contaminating us in any way. And, as this very useful page points out, disgust even plays a significant role in many of our religions, in how they regulate behaviors and bodily processes.
Really, that last link is the true extravaganza today. Check it out. Or don’t check it out, and go straight to this page to take a quiz on what sort of disgust you specialize in, and how it compares to others who have taken the quiz. Nowhere in the quiz, thank Blob, is the phase “It’s scary accurate!!!” written. It’s a little more scientific than that, but still interesting. What you end up with is a scale that shows how disgust plays not only into your actual health, but also into your morals (or… how morals play into your disgust?) The results are broken into “Core disgust,” which covers the sort of things we find gross because the could porentially make us sick (the rotten meat and bugs thing), “Animal-reminder disgust,” which comes from “death, corpses, and violations of the external boundaries of the body,” and is all about reminding us of our own mortality (they make us think about how we can and will die), and, finally, “Contamination disgust,” which is about whole-body contamination (as opposed to just the mouth), and covers our disgust for “dirty or sleazy people.”
I’d invite y’all to share your results with the Buzz community, and to let us know if the ratings make sense for you, but if you’re feeling private, take a gander at JGordon’s scores:
For “Core Disgust” I scored a .9. The average for the other 37,100 people tested was 1.9. This makes sense. I did, after all, eat a peanut I found in my sock this morning. But I would never eat that peanut a second time.
For “Animal-reminder Disgust” I got a 1.6, the same as the average score. In general, I consider myself to be slightly below average, but this also makes sense. I do fear death. Or, at least, I fear the dead. Zombies, I mean. This may have skewed the results some, but I suspect it’s in the correct neighborhood.
And for “Contamination Disgust” I scored a mere .2, next to the average of 1.1. Again, it makes sense. Being very sleazy myself (I moisturize with my own spit), I can’t afford to look down on other sleazebags, or else I’d be even lonelier. (Hey, don’t worry, I’ve got my Beanie Babies to keep me company. They’re all stuffed with the appropriate animal feces, by the way.)
While you’re stewing on all that, check this out: pretty soon we may be able to go out and get maggot juice to rub into our many open sores. Rad, huh? Science Buzz regulars will know that we’re all about maggots here. It’s mostly Liza, I suppose, but there’s not one of us that didn’t push a fist into the pig and enjoy it at least a little bit. (Some part of this is not true.)
Anyway, maggot juice. Maggots’ abilities to help a would stay clean and heal is well documented, but now there are some scientists who are convinced that they’ve figured out exactly why maggots are so beneficial to healing tissue. They have isolated an enzyme in the goo that gooey little maggots secret, which seems to remove decaying tissue from a wound, thereby preventing bacteria from building up at the site. If the enzyme could be reproduced, or just milked from maggots or something, we could remove the maggots from maggoty therapy. How about that? So now you just have to decide which disgusts you the least: maggot milk, maggots, or your own tissue rotting on your body.
Ding! Extravaganza over!
(Good looking out, Gene and Liza, for the links.)
Monday Morning ExecStaff doodle
Courtesy Bradley Wind
Heard this cool story on NPR is morning. Turns out doodling when your bored (at school or at a meeting) actually helps you pay attention.
An experiment was conducted where a researcher played...
...a lengthy and boring tape of a telephone message to a collection of people, only half of whom had been given a doodling task. After the tape ended she quizzed them on what they had retained and found that the doodlers remembered much more than the nondoodlers.
So doodling wasn't a distraction, rather it helped maintain concentration by providing enough of a focused task to prevent a person from drifting off into daydream land.
I thought it was interesting. Also interesting are presidential doodles.
Good, good: Kiss some of the other babies... and then threaten them. It'll be a landslide.
Courtesy Ti.moHere at Science Buzz we try to provide solid scientific information that Internet enthusiasts young and old might use to enhance their lives and their understanding of the world. Ding.
I’m sorry to admit, however, that we rarely offer advice directly to politicians. Sure, bloggers here might make their political leanings obvious from time to time, but we generally don’t give politicians pointers on how to enhance their careers.
Well there’s finally a Buzzer (me) with the courage (plenty) to stand up for the little guy (politicians) and hand out some advice (very valuable).
And here it is: If you want to manipulate people, make them afraid.
What? You sort of already knew that? Well no one sort of likes a smarty-pants, so zip it.
Besides, what you knew before was anecdotal. This is scientific. (Political science, but still, it was published, and that’s pretty good. Right?)
What’s more, it’s not quite so simple as the above statement. The real trick is to get your fear-mongering manipulation in when you’re dealing with a subject that people don’t understand very well. If the plebeians have solid mental footing, they’re much more likely to see through your crumby policies and deceptive statements. But if they’re uncertain about something, start up your scare engine and manipulate away.
Let’s do some practice runs:
“Your cats are unwholesome, and will eat your children. Kill them, and donate all money saved on cat food to my campaign.”
No, I know that isn’t true. If anything, the cats are in danger of being eaten by me. Plus I don’t own children. So I’m keeping that money, junior.
“Cloning research is unwholesome. It will de-value human life. I am against cloning, so vote for me.”
Say… I saw The Matrix. That was scary. I don’t know how cloning works, but it is scary. I am against cloning too. And I’m for you, junior.
“My opponent’s economic policies are going to ruin you. Check it.”
Hey… I’ll probably only live about 2 and a half billion seconds in my life. Economics involves trillions of dollars… that’s incomprehensible to me. I’m yours, junior.
See how easy and fun that was?
Science and scientific stuff is a good place to start, of course, because a lot of people don’t know a lot of stuff about science.
(On the offhand chance that you’re a non-politician reading this, I suppose you could get yerself educated about some science, etc, and have a better idea of when someone is trying to make you afraid and control you. But that’s not very nice to the politicians, is it?)
The more happy people you know, the happier you're likely to be: But is it worth it?
Courtesy ripleybsxOkay, okay, y’all are getting stressed out about fear being contagious (I can smell it), so consider this:
It’s not contagious in quite the same way as fear though. There are no pheromones directly involved—no, just being happy makes other people happy, they make people happy, and so forth (leave it to happiness to have such a milquetoast, touchy-feely method of transmission).
What’s remarkable here isn’t that being happy or sad can make other people happy or sad, it’s how happiness seems to have a cascade effect through social networks (you know, like Facebook, right, but in real life).
When someone is sad for whatever reason, their sadness doesn’t necessarily make a ton of other people sad. But when someone becomes happy, their happiness seems to flow into their social network by three degrees of the familiar six degrees of separation that divide any two people in a huge social network. That is, if you’re happy, your friends are more likely to be happy, and so are your friends’ friends, and so are your friends’ friends’ friends, but that’s about where it stops.
If you’re happy, friend living within one mile from you have a 25% increase in their chances of being happy, a co-resident spouse has an 8% increase, siblings a 14% increase, and next door neighbors a 34% increase in their likelihood of being happy. (Isn’t that odd? Your neighbors are more than 4 times more likely to be affected by your happiness than your spouse is.) And if any of these people do become happy, then the effect rolls over to their friends, neighbors, etc., and the system usually stretches to about 3 degrees from the original happy person.
Researchers figured the specifics of this out by mining through data on 5000 subjects over 20 years collected by the Framington Heart Study, which collected information on the social networks of its participants, as well as their ratings on the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Index.
It’s kind of like that movie Pay it Forward, except without Kevin Spacey. See, Kevin Spacey is never happy. His childhood was haunted by a series of premature deaths of pet guinea pigs, his adolescence marred by a rare bone condition known as “wiggle fingers,” and on the day he would win the Best Actor award for “American Beauty” he swallowed a pen cap, ruining the whole evening. The chain of happiness ends with Kevin Spacey.
The study also confirmed that popularity does indeed lead to happiness. If you’re at the center of a social network (i.e. popular), you’re more likely to be surrounded by happy people, and so more likely to be happy yourself (because happiness cascades, but sadness doesn’t, more friends and associates just increases your odds).
Hmm. Now that I think of it, it’s not just like Pay it Forward, it’s like every zombie movie ever made. If you’re a zombie, people living near you and people who might try to band up with you in a zombie disaster are more likely to become zombies themselves (although we’d have to boost that spouse probability up from 8%). And, the same way the popularity increases your chance of happiness, being surrounded by zombies increases your chances of becoming a zombie (or at least your chances of getting your face eaten).
So I guess the take-home messages are as follows:
-Social networks aren’t just on the Internet. (Questionable)
-If you’re happy, that doesn’t mean Kevin Bacon will be happy, even if he knows your friends’ friends’ friends.
-If you’re happy, that certainly doesn’t mean that Kevin Spacey will be happy. (But don’t feel bad about it.)
-Being an individualist makes you less likely to be happy.
-Popularity is everything. But…
-Being popular also increases your chances of having your face eaten by a zombie.
Are y’all with me?
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