The world scarcely needs any more medical journals. The National Library of Medicine already indexes some 5,200 of them, from Applied Immunohistochemistry & Molecular Morphology to Gut.
But based on the dozens of studies that pass my desk every day, I think there should be two more scholarly periodicals: I’d call them Duh!, for findings that never seemed to be in doubt in the first place, and Huh?, for those whose usefulness remains obscure, at least to lay readers.
Duh!’s first issue could include findings such as these, which ran in prestigious journals or were presented at scientific conferences recently:
•Toddlers become irritable when prevented from napping.
•Cats make humans do what they want by purring.
•TV crime dramas inaccurately portray violent crime in America.
•People with high IQs make wise economic decisions.
Huh?’s first issue could contain these head-scratchers:
•Men are better than women at hammering in the dark.
•Young orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos laugh when tickled.
•Neither alcohol (in him) nor makeup (on her) effect a man’s ability to guess a woman’s age.
•The more abdominal hair, the greater the tendency to collect belly-button lint.
Not surprisingly, the researchers involved in each of these studies maintain that their work is neither obvious nor silly when understood in the proper context. (Having an advanced degree also helps.)
“What makes you think that it was common knowledge that laughter has a pre-human basis?” Marina Davila Ross, a primatologist at the University of Portsmouth, U.K., wrote in an email. For their study in Current Biology last month, she and colleagues compared “tickle-induced vocalizations” from four types of great apes and human infants and determined that the sounds share a common evolutionary ancestry, going back at least 10 million years.
Karen McComb, a University of Sussex behavioral ecologist, was equally protective of her cat-communication study, which ran in Current Biology last week. “Of course pet owners know that their cats and dogs have particular ways of getting their attention,” she emailed. “The interesting thing about our study is…WHY they do this.”
After having 50 humans rate solicitation and non-solicitation purrs from 10 different cats, the researchers found that particularly urgent purrs have the same sound frequency as a meow, similar to a baby’s cry. Thus cats may be tapping into the intrinsic human compulsion to nurture offspring. “Even cat owners are surprised to find what is going on,” wrote Dr. McComb.
(Listen to solicitation and non-solicitation purrs on the University of Sussex Web site: http://www.lifesci.sussex.ac.uk/cmvcr/Domestic%20cats.html )
Sometimes things that uninformed readers think are obvious aren’t at all to people who know more. When I suggested to Stephen V. Burks, a behavioral economist at the University of Minnesota, Morris, that it wasn’t surprising that people with high IQs make wise economic choices, he said, “If you think so, you knew more than a lot of economists did.” His multiyear study of 1,000 trucker-trainees, funded in part by the MacArthur Foundation and reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, is the first strong evidence that cognitive and noncognitive skills are linked, he said. On one level, it could help explain why some people are poor; on another level, it shows that even in service jobs, such as trucking, that don’t require a college degree but do require a lot of self-management, those with greater cognitive skills are more likely to succeed.
Some studies attempt to show that a correlational relationship is actually causal (that is, two things don’t just go together; one thing causes the other). That was the case with the study finding that 2-to-3-year-olds get more worried, anxious and cranky when deprived of naps. Monique K. LeBourgeois, an assistant professor at Brown University’s Center for the Study of Human Development, explained that the study, presented at a sleep-research conference last month, is part of a larger research program looking at pathways to mental illness, and with some schools eliminating naps in all-day pre-kindergarten programs, “hard science is needed to inform public policy.”
At times, a seemingly obvious research finding serves a secondary point. Mayo Clinic psychiatrist Timothy Lineberry says he and the two medical students who compared the murder situations depicted on six seasons of “CSI” and “CSI: Miami” with national crime data weren’t surprised that they didn’t match. They were emphasizing the point that alcohol plays a larger role in such crimes than the public may realize. The study was presented to the American Psychiatric Association in May.
In the same vein, the report in the British Journal of Psychology in April that alcohol and makeup have little affect on a man’s ability to judge a woman’s age served, in part, to refute an oft-heard excuse given by male sex offenders for picking up underage women in bars.
Interestingly, the more participants drank, the less likely they were to rate the women as attractive. “This seemingly flies in the face of the commonly held notion of ‘beer goggles,’ ” said lead researcher Vincent Egan, a forensic psychologist at the University of Leicester, U.K.
Several of the researchers I contacted expressed frustration with the way their work had been characterized in the popular press.
“What the media glommed on to was the difference between men and women hammering in the dark and the logical question was, ‘Why do we care? We’ll never hammer in the dark,’ ” said Duncan Irschick, an associate professor of human biomechanics at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His study on hammering, presented at an experimental-biology conference last month, is part of a five-year $1.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study how humans, from infancy to adulthood, learn to use tools under different conditions. “On the most profound level, it really addresses something about why we are human,” he said. “Animals don’t use tools.”
When reminded that the press release for his study had highlighted the hammering-in-the-dark aspect, Dr. Irschick noted that press releases often focus on something simple to attract media attention.
Indeed, in an effort to attract media coverage, academics—and their publicists— often underestimate the ability of the public to understand and appreciate what they are studying and why.
Huh? and Duh! would attempt to bridge this communication gap between academic researchers and the popular press. Phrases such as “novel empirical construct” will be replaced by “which nobody has done quite this way before.” Words such as “whilst” will be banned.
Given the current push for “evidence-based medicine,” we may well see more studies attempting to confirm the previously only suspected, providing ongoing fodder for Duh! (As editor-in-chief, I’m thinking of tapping Gordon C.S. Smith, a University of Cambridge obstetrician, who wrote a classic paper in the British Medical Journal in 2003 noting that he could find no randomized controlled trials testing whether parachutes prevent death and injuries in response to “gravitational challenge” —i.e., jumping out of aircraft.)
Like Dr. Smith, a few academic researchers are having a bit of fun, which we will certainly encourage in Huh? Georg Steinhauser, a chemist at the Vienna University of Technology, said it was the surprise of his career that the journal Medical Hypotheses accepted his study entitled “The Nature of Navel Fluff.” Inspired by a question posed in the 2005 book, “Why Do Men Have Nipples?” Dr. Steinhauser theorized that belly-button lint is largely the result of abdominal hair channeling loose shirt fibers. To test his hypothesis, he collected 503 pieces of his own belly-button lint over three years, wearing different shirts. Then he shaved his abdominal hair and found that no more lint collected.
“Many people nominated me for an ig-Nobel prize,” Dr. Steinhauser wrote.
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Full article and photo: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203946904574300352699458552.html
