The laughable findings that make you think

MEDICAL MATTERS:DID YOU KNOW that when people have an urgent need to use the toilet, they at the same time manage better self-control in other areas of their lives?

Of course you didn’t, and you may never have gleaned this priceless nugget if it were not for the latest Ig Nobel awards, which were announced recently.

Hosted by the journal Annals of Improbable Research,the Igs are an annual exercise in irreverence that celebrate scientific studies which "cannot, or should not, be repeated".

The awards honour science that “first makes you laugh and then makes you think”.

Now in its 21st year, Ig Nobel is a play on the word “ignoble” and “Nobel” from Alfred Nobel; it is a parody of the Nobel Prizes which are announced some days later.

Dr Mirjam Tuk, lead author of the paper, I nhibitory Spillover: Increased Urination Urgency Facilitates Impulse Control in Unrelated Domains, which won this year's Ig prize for medicine, was asked what the title meant.

“If people have to go to the toilet more urgently, that facilitates impulse control in other domains. So, for example, it means they become more patient with money, they are better able to wait for a later, but larger reward, instead of the more impulsive, more immediate reward,” she says.

Whether this is an argument for going shopping with a full bladder in order to reduce impulse buying I’m not sure.

The Ig Nobel award for psychology went to a researcher from the University of Oslo who wanted to understand the everyday meaning of why people sigh (an idea explored in more detail in this week’s That’s The Why column on page 15).

This year's literature prize went to retired Stanford University professor John Perry for his explanation of "structured procrastination". He says that "the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something even more important". Which seems a good excuse for writing a shorter than usual column this week ( Relax Ed, I'm jesting).

The Japanese winners of the chemistry Ig Nobel were concerned about the plight of deaf people who cannot hear smoke alarms. So they went researching “functional alerting smells” that could be squirted into the air in the event of a fire.

After testing lots of different scents, the researchers hit on wasabi and calculated the ideal density of a wasabi spray needed to waken deaf people as a smoke alarm.

Joint winners of the biology prize, Daryll Gwynne of the University of Toronto, Canada, and David Rentz of James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, discovered that a certain type of beetle prefers to mate with a certain kind of Australian beer bottle.

Gwynne noticed that male buprestid beetles had a peculiar attraction to a type of short-necked brown beer bottle when it lay by the side of the road.

“Here’s a male making a mating mistake,” he said. Gwynne goes on to explain that tiny dimples on the brown glass bottle are a “superstimulus”, which means they look better than a female to the male beetle.

Human males would never be so stupid, would they?

So far, my favourite from the 21 years has been the Ig Nobel prize for medicine that went to Dr Francis Fesmire of the University of Tennessee College of Medicine for his paper describing a unique way to terminate intractable hiccups.

When a patient of his did not respond to standard therapies for the symptom, Dr Fesmire came up with an unusual solution. Aiming to stimulate the vagus nerve, which plays a role in hiccups, he stuck his (gloved) finger up the patient’s rectum.

To the doctor's delight the hiccups stopped, leading to the publication of a paper Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage in the Annals of Emergency Medicineand an Ig Nobel award.

The patient’s reaction is not recorded.