Hi I’m John Green. Welcome to my salon. This is Mental Floss on YouTube and did you
know that in 2010, a researcher trained pigeons to tell the difference between “good”
and “bad” paintings by children? The pigeons were positively reinforced when they pecked
at good paintings. And after a while, they were able to determine which ones were good,
even observing color and pattern cues in paintings they'd never seen before.
And that’s the first of many odd scientific studies that I’m going to share with you
today, in this video made possible by our friends at Geico
A study was conducted at the Babraham Institute to determine whether sheep were capable of
recognizing the faces of other sheep. When the study concluded in 2001, the researchers
had discovered that sheep could recognize the faces of 50 sheep about 80% of the time,
and they remembered them for over two years. Which is much better than my own sheep facial recognition.
In 2011, researchers at Albany Medical College played songs by Beethoven and Miles Davis
to rats, learning that they preferred silence, but would rather hear Beethoven than Miles Davis.
Then, the researchers injected some rats with cocaine while listening to Miles Davis. Because you know, why not?
At this point they weren't even conducting a study they were just enjoying some jazz and dosing rats with cocaine, as you do.
But anyway they learned that those rats preferred the jazz music, even after the cocaine was out of their systems.
Dr. Allan Walker Blair, an assistant professor of pathology and bacteriology at the University
of Alabama, allowed a black widow spider to bite him in the 1930s. There was little research
on the spider at the time, so he wanted to document his experience with the bite. Unsurprisingly,
he discovered that it caused what he described as “excruciating” pain. For the record,
he lived, but died of cardiac arrest about a decade later, which was probably related to the experience.
Speaking of horrible experiments performed on oneself, in the nineties, veterinarian
Robert Lopez took ear mites from a cat’s ear and placed them in his own ear. He was trying
to determine whether humans could get mites from cats. It turns out that we can,
but he still repeated the experiment TWICE and then got it published in the Journal of the
American Veterinary Medical Association.
In the 1960's at Penn State University, an experiment was conducted on a male turkey
to see how minimal a stimuli had to be for it to be considered a mate. The researchers
kept removing components of a turkey until a turkey head on a stick. And the male
turkey STILL tried to mate with it.
A 2012 study found that human male athletes experienced increases in testosterone in their saliva
while doing squats after watching short videos containing either “erotic, humorous, or aggressive”
content.
In 1976, a group of researchers did a study to determine whether the speed and flow of
men’s urination was affected by people being too near them. And I can just tell you yes.
But anyway, in order to do this, they left an observer with a periscope in
a public restroom for extended periods of
time. He found that the closer a man had to pee next to another man, the longer it took
for him to start urinating. He also peed on average less if someone was standing next to him.
Speaking of urine-related studies, Peter Snyder, a professor of neurology at Brown University,
discovered that people who have to pee really badly actually have increased levels of cognitive
impairment. The study cost him a total of $1.25 to complete.
In 2012, a group of psychologists found that “leaning to the left makes the Eiffel Tower
seem smaller.” Basically, when people are leaning, their ability to estimate things
like quantity and size is affected because we tend to assume that smaller things go on
the left and larger ones belong on the right.
It may be a result of bias among people who read from left to right
Which we should follow up with a study of people who read right to left
and see what happens when they lean right. I just gave you an idea for a study, SCIENCE.
A paper published in 2004 out of the Zoology Institution of Stockholm University is well-summed-up
by the title: “Chickens prefer beautiful humans.” It turns out that chickens tend
to peck at faces that humans also prefer and consider beautiful.
It's a good thing all those chickens live in Sweden because Swedish people are very beautiful.
I'm sure that chickens enjoy just pecking their faces constantly.
Dr. Anna Wilkinson of the University of Lincoln in the UK trained a red-footed tortoise to
yawn in order to research social cognition in tortoises. Over the course of six months
in 2011, Wilkinson and her team taught the tortoise to yawn on command, though they didn’t
observe contagious yawning when they had the tortoise yawn around other members of its
species.
In 2003, the journal Polar Biology published a paper on the trajectory of penguins’ projectile
poop. Apparently, penguins poop that way because of gastrointestinal pressure. And in case
you’re wondering, the poop lands an average of 40 cm away from the penguin.
So watch out WonderWoman!
In the early 1900s, Romanian scientist Nicolae Minovici hung himself TWELVE times for up
to 25 seconds, with an assistant nearby. He survived and was able to observe firsthand a lot of the symptoms
of hanging, like vision problems and ringing in the ears.
At the University of Minnesota in 2004, scientists discovered that it’s just as easy to swim
in syrup as it is to swim in water. In order to conduct the experiment, they filled a 25-meter
swimming pool with a liquid made of guar gum (a liquid twice as thick as water).
Turns out that you can swim in it just fine. Why do we need to know this? Well why do we need to know anything, really?
In 1986, eleven Russian men spent 370 days lying down in bed. The experiment was to help
with future space expeditions because the year in bed simulated weightlessness.
The U.S. has conducted some dubious sleep experiments too. In the early 1900s, Dr. Nathaniel
Kleitman had six men stay awake for days to see the symptoms. But, HE stayed awake for
longer than any of them when he forced himself to stay awake for 115 hours, causing hallucinations.
He also once lived underground for six weeks, trying to adjust to a twenty-eight-hour day.
So you know, he was a fun guy to hang out with, I bet.
During the early 2000s, an argument over whether actor Steve Buscemi was cool prompted researchers
Ilan Dar-Nimrod and Ian Hansen to research what characteristics make a person “cool.”
They surveyed 353 college students and determined some of the qualities, like being good-looking,
friendly, and successful. Or being the star of the HBO series Boardwalk Empire.
In 2013, a group of researchers joined forces and asked people at bars to rate their own
attractiveness. They found that the higher the BAC of people, the higher they rated themselves
on attractiveness.
The study "Patient Preference for Waxed or Unwaxed Dental Floss" was published in 1990.
And since I KNOW you’re wondering, around 79% of subjects preferred waxed dental floss and around
21% unwaxed.
At the National University of Quilmes in 2007, scientists found that hamsters recovered 50%
faster from shifts in their daily time cycles when they were given Viagra. That means that
Viagra could potentially help people with jet lag.
In the seventies and eighties, professors at Florida State University studied the reactions
of men and women when a stranger approached them and asked, “Would you go to bed with
me?” The majority of men said yes whereas every single woman said no.
Because they aren't crazy, who would say yes to that question? Like did you ask do you have chlamydia first?
There have been multiple studies on whether owners looked like their dogs. Although we all know that they do. Like, in 2004,
Michael Roy and Nicholas Christenfeld had participants match pictures of owners with
pictures of their dogs. The participants were right 64% of the time. ALSO Roy and Christenfeld
found that people had a much easier time matching pure-breds with their owners, rather than
mixed breeds.
And if I can just make a personal comment here
Both Mental Floss director Mark and Mental Floss writer Meredith look exactly like their dogs.
I on the other hand in no way resemble mine.
Finally, I return to the salon to tell you about a similar study. During the eighties, psychologist Robert Zajonc discovered
that married couples start to look like each other over time. To prove this, he gave participants
a bunch of photographs of single faces -- 24 were pictures of individuals in a couple when
they first got married and 24 were of the same people, but 25 years later. Then, he
asked participants to match up pictures of men with the women who looked most like them.
There was significantly more resemblance in the couples after twenty-five years; and participants
could match them much easier.
Which is good news for me, because it means I'm going to get lot cuter in the next 15 years.
Thanks for watching this episode of Mental Floss on YouTube, which was brought to you
by our friends at Geico and made with the help of all these nice people,
who work so hard on this show every week. So thanks to them, thanks to you for watching, and as we say in my hometown DFTBA!