• Fluid Dynamics: Rouslan Krechetnikov and Hans
Mayer, for studying how liquid sloshes when
someone walks while carrying a cup of coffee.
• Chemistry: Johan Pettersson, for discovering
why the hair of people in certain houses in a
Swedish town turned green.
• Neuroscience: Craig Bennett, Abigail Baird, Mi-
chael Miller, and George Wolford, for showing
that brain researchers using complex instru-
ments and inappropriate statistics can turn
up seemingly meaningful brain activity any-
where—even in a dead salmon.
• Medicine: Emmanuel Ben-Soussan and Michel
Antonietti, for helping doctors keep patients’
colons from exploding during colonoscopies.
Improbable Research depends on volunteers
in many countries and an editorial board of
some 50 eminent scientists, including several
Nobel (and Ig Nobel) Prize winners. The group
publishes a magazine, a newsletter, a newspaper
column, books, and a daily blog. But it is best
known for the Ig Nobel awards, which the British
journal Nature calls “arguably the highlight of
the scientific calendar.”
T
he Ig Nobel awards may seem a bit off
the wall, but they reflect the human
mind’s love of wordplay, wit, parody, curios-
ity, and imagination. You don’t even have to
be a prizewinner to have an amazing mind.
Each day, in the course of ordinary living,
we all make countless decisions, construct
explanations, draw inferences about other
people’s behavior, try to understand our own
motives, laugh at something that strikes
us as funny, and organize and reorganize
the contents of our mental world. René
Descartes’ famous declaration “I think,
therefore I am” could just as well have been
reversed: “I am, therefore I think.” Our pow-
ers of thought and intelligence have inspired
humans to immodestly call ourselves Homo
sapiens, Latin for wise or rational man.
Think for a moment about what think-
ing does for you. It frees you from the con-
fines of the immediate present: You can
think about a trip taken three years ago, a
party next Saturday, or the War of 1812. It
carries you beyond the boundaries of real-
ity: You can imagine unicorns and utopias,
Martians and magic. You can make plans
far into the future and judge the probability
of events, both good and bad. Because you
think, you do not need to grope your way
blindly through your problems but can apply
knowledge and reasoning to solve them
intelligently and creatively.
But just how “sapiens” are we, really? In
Australia, a 23-year-old man put fireworks
between his buttocks and set them off. This
trick backfired—literally: He was taken to
the hospital with severe burns on his back-
side and genitals. In Nottingham, England,
the mayor distributed flyers telling visitors
that Robin Hood and his pals never actually
lived in nearby Sherwood Forest, inasmuch
as they were fictional characters; tourism
plummeted. In Colorado, a woman com-
plained to a local newspaper that the “extra
hour of sunlight” during daylight savings
time was burning up her lawn.
The human mind, which has managed
to come up with poetry, penicillin, and PCs,
is certainly a miraculous thing; but the
human mind has also managed to come up
with traffic jams, spam, and war. To bet-
ter understand why the same species that
figured out how to get to the moon is also
capable of breathtaking bumbling here on
earth, we will examine in this chapter how
people reason, solve problems, and grow
in intelligence, as well as some sources of
their mental shortcomings. These topics are
the focus of cognitive psychology, the study
of mental processes.
