 Good evening, everybody. Ig Nobel Prizes, as many of you know, are awarded for things that make people laugh and then think. Most of the new 2023 Ig Nobel Prize winners are here with us tonight in this room. Tonight, the winners will ask each other questions about their work. That's the whole event. Ig Nobel Prize winners asking each other questions about what they did that won an Ig Nobel Prize. To keep the discussions intimate, we're dividing all of this into little groups. So four little discussion groups, one after the other, not simultaneously. Each group will be facilitated by a combination of people. And those people facilitating it are Karen Hopkins. And Karen, if you could stand and take a bow. Karen is a biochemist. She's the co-author of the textbook, Essential Cell Biology. And she is the creator of the Studmuffins of Science Calendar. Do we have any Studmuffins with us this evening? No. Also, Danny Adams. Danny. Danny is a biologist, a pioneer in the field of bioelectricity. And she's chief science officer of Lucell Diagnostics, which is a company. And Eric Maskin. Eric is a professor of economics at Harvard University. And he has a Nobel Prize in economics. And me. I created the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. This event is a collaboration between Improbable Research, the gang of us who organized the Ig Nobel Prizes, and the MIT Museum. And it's a sort of joyous reunion, the very first Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, way back in 1991, happened in the old MIT Museum building. This is the brand new building. In case you're not aware of it, this is a new building. The museum just moved everything down the street. We're happy you're here. We have eight of this year's 10 Ig Nobel Prizes. We're able to send representatives. The other two were not able to travel. And the winners all kindly, and I thank you all winners, kindly found a way to get themselves from around the world to here tonight. The first discussion group is sitting right here. Let me introduce them. Christine Pham, if you could stand and take a bow or sit and take a bow. Christine traveled here from Irvine, California. She and her team won the Ig Nobel Medicine Prize for using cadavers to explore whether there's an equal number of hairs in each of a person's two nostrils. Maybe you want to stand and take another bow. Her colleague, Natasha Messinskowska, is also here and will be in one of the later discussion groups. Natasha, if you'd like to stand and take a bow. Also here is Chris Moulin. Chris traveled here from Grenoble, France. He and his team won the Ig Nobel Literature Prize for studying the sensations many people feel when they repeat a single word many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many times. Chris, take a bow, another. Chris' colleague Akira O'Connor is here and will be in one of the later groups. Akira, if you could stand and take a bow. And Bietto Fernandez Castro. Bietto? Bietto traveled here from Southampton, England. He and his team won the Ig Nobel Physics Prize for measuring the extent to which ocean water mixing is affected by the sexual activity of anchovies. And Eric Maskin, who you've met and who will take, I hope, another bow. And this is what we'll do at the start of each discussion group to give you some context. We'll begin with tiny one minute long descriptions by the Ig Nobel winners of what they did. So then after that, we'll have the discussion. First of these one minute introductions is by Christine Pham. Christine? Sitting down or standing up? Up to you. OK. All right. Hi, everyone. My name is Christine Pham. I'm a medical doctor specializing in dermatology at the University of California, Irvine. And our project was measuring and quantifying the amount of nose hairs in cadavers. So here's my little nose prop. So we found that there were about 120 nose hairs in the left nostril and about 112 nose hairs in the right nostril. This was non-significant, though, and very similar in both nose. But that also we found that nose hairs grow about one centimeter inward in the nostrils. So all the way right here. So thank you very much. I hope you found that very informative. And I'm very excited to have this nose-worthy award. The next one minute summary is Akira. Oh, Akira was originally going to do this. We swapped people around. Chris Mulan. Chris? Thank you. OK, so in one minute, minute, minute, minute, minute, minute, minute, minute, minute, minute, minute, minute, minute. I will explain to you why it's important to study what happens when we repeat something until it becomes meaningless. Unlike modern society, the brain is capable of doing its own fact checking. This kind of error elimination is what we are interested in in our day-to-day research, an ability called metacognition. Mostly we study deja vu. Here the fact checking comes along to tell you that although the scene or conversation feels familiar, you know it is impossible that life is repeating. But progress is slow for deja vu. It is infrequent in daily life, and it's difficult to provoke in the lab. So we turn to its opposite, deja vu. Ja vu is the feeling that something you know to be familiar is weird, like that feeling when a word looks wrong, even though when you know it is spelled correctly. That sort of feeling is easy to provoke in the laboratory by asking people to repeatedly write the word. That's our contribution to science. It opens up new possibilities to research all kinds of weird. We'll be given by Beato Fernandez Casper. And our next lecture will be given by Beato Fernandez Casper. Beato? Hello. All right. Hello, everyone. We like to study ocean turbulence. Turbulence is very important in the ocean because it shapes ocean currents, the ocean marine ecosystems, and our climate. And we study turbulence in a coastal environment for 15 days. And we wanted to understand how this turbulence impacts algae there, but we found something very different. We found turbulence was very intense every night. And we couldn't explain that by winds or tides, which are the normal factors that drive turbulence in the ocean. And by looking at the different piece of evidence, we found that the turbulence was driven by anchovies that came to this area to mate and fertilize their eggs. So we think our study is important because it's the first time someone is able to show that other than winds and tides, animals by doing sex can mix the different layers of water together, impacting who knows, maybe our climate. And now questions. And let's start out with Eric. Do you have a question for somebody? I bet you do. I do. So I had the chance of meeting Christine online because I had the pleasure of awarding her her Ig Nobel Prize. What I didn't find out when we talked was just how you came up with the idea of studying nostril hairs. So that's a really good question. So being in dermatology, we see a lot of hair loss patients in the clinic. One condition that we see a lot is a condition called alopecia ariata. It's a chronic autoimmune condition where there's a lot of patchy hair loss, not only on the scalp, but also on the eyebrows and nose. And so patients will come in and they'll talk about how their nose is so irritating. It's so dry how they're getting rhinitis. And I think a lot of it is what we theorize is secondary to the lack of nose hairs. And so looking in literature, we wanted to see if there's any evidence to support this. But there was no literature on the anatomy of nose hairs. And so we figured, why not? Let's just study this and figure out how many nose hairs are in the nostrils and the impact of that. And how did you get hold of the cadavers? Everyone has been asking me that. So being a med student at the University of California, Irvine, we have a fantastic program called the Wheeled Body Donor Program. It's amazing. So generous people will donate their bodies to be cadavers for medical students. And so it's a really amazing opportunity because we get hands-on experience dissecting cadavers. And so we get to learn anatomy very, very well. Since this nose hair study is very new, we wanted to work with what we did have. And so since we had the cadavers as part of our program in school, we thought, why don't we just study it in cadavers first and see what we find there? Christine, would you have a question for Chris? Yeah. How did you come about studying the Jamavu? So Jamavu is like a side project, but I hope to make it more of a full project. But I was mostly doing research on deja vu. And it'd be possibly nice to ask who in the audience has ever had deja vu. So like pretty much nearly everybody. And that's good. Deja vu is correlated with intelligence, so you can give yourself a round of applause. But Jamavu is related to deja vu. So Jamavu is like the opposite. And so you may or may not have experienced it, or you may have experienced it, but not know the name. And that's why we're pleased to be here, because we're letting you know what it's called. So Jamavu is like, I often get it for words that look like they're spelt wrong. I once had it for the word this. And I looked at it and I just thought this word is wrong. But it was obviously right. So who's had Jamavu or who thinks they've had Jamavu? So I think slightly fewer people. But anyway, so we just got researching it because human beings are lazy. Deja vu is infrequent and difficult to measure in the laboratory. And we just thought it would be easier to measure jamavu. And it goes back to when I was a naughty school child, I wasn't very good at school. I had the punishment of just like Bart Simpson, I had to write lines. And I noticed that when I was writing lines, it all became meaningless. So I wondered whether that was like jamavu. And that was what Akira and I, that was our hunch. And that was what started us doing the research to try and find something in the laboratory that was comparable to this weird sensation we have in daily life. It's very fascinating. Bruce, would you have a question for Vienta? I would have a question. Why do fish have sex at night? That's a very good one, really. Yeah. No idea. Yeah, I guess they probably came where we are because it's quite a shelter place. Why they came at night? I don't know. I'm not a sexologist. OK. I must repeat very often these days. But it's a very good question. Well, how about let's... They probably maybe escaped predators, actually. OK. Yeah. And so people like anchovies, you either love them or hate them. You love them, I guess. I like them. Not in pizza. They get too salty, which is very cooked, right? And is it species specific? Is it only anchovies that do this? Do you need big... No, many other fish aggregate for having sex, basically. But I think anchovies aggregate in very large numbers like all the pelagic fish like sardine. But we don't know at all what's the extent, how important that may be for ocean turbulence. We have no idea. Vienta, do you have a question for anybody? I have a question for Chris, actually. So I was thinking that your research lights some hope for people that are suffering. They are trying to forget their ex-boyfriend, or ex-girlfriend. So how many times do you reckon you have to repeat your ex's name so you can forget it? Very good. Well, so we haven't run exactly that condition. But at least with a... You see, I don't think we'd ever forget it. They just begin to feel weirder and weirder. So with words, it's about... You need to say it for about a minute or about 30 times before it gets really weird. So, yeah. It's probably not advisable to be caught saying your ex's name with your current partner, I would suggest. But I'm no expert on those things. I'd say you are advised. Thank you. You saved my life. Chris, would you have a question for Christine? Yes, well, with Christine, I was really like nostrils seem interesting, but would it apply to other body parts? So would we have asymmetries or differences between the two sides of the body? Oh, yeah. So asymmetry is very common on everyone's body. Everyone has asymmetry on their face, on their body parts, and it's completely normal. We don't fully know. People think it's part genetics, part embryology, so we're still studying it. But we do know, for example, for a palate, the left palate develops later than the right palate. So that's why a lot of times when you look at cleft lip deformities, you see it more on the left than the right. So we do know that. But how it applies to the rest of the body part, we're still learning, but asymmetry is very, very normal. So it's okay to be a little lopsided. And our nasal hairs, they do things right. They're not just there to be ugly. They have a service. They're functional, yes. They're very, very functional. So nose hairs are very important. So they regulate temperature. So if you're hot, they'll try to keep you cool. If you're cool, they'll try to keep you warm. And then they serve as this protective barrier against all those environmental allergens outside. So you'll notice that, you know, when you go outside and it's very polluted, you'll notice that your nose is a little bit more congested. And that's cause your nose hairs are working. Okay, wow. Christine, did you have a question for the egg top? Yes. I was curious. So your study is in the Northwest, Siberian Peninsula. Are there other hotspots where we have anchovies like spawning and causing the ocean mixing that we should look out for? We know that anchovies and all the similar fish are spawning in many places. So what's particular about the area where we were working is that it's an abwelling area. So it's a place where deep waters come to the surface. And deep waters have lots of nutrients. So there's a very, it's a really thriving marine ecosystem that happens in other places like off the coast of Peru, off the coast of Africa. And those are places where there are large aggregations of fish, but nobody has been there to measure these particular phenomenon. So we don't know what implications it may have. Chris, questions for anybody? Questions for anybody? I mean, I'd like to ask Eric if he's had jamivu or deja vu. I've had both. In fact, I'm getting a sense of deja vu right now. From all of the previous ignoble ceremonies. But a question for you as a researcher, I know that the number one question is funding. So how did you, I assume you approached some funding body and said, I want to work on this and how did you get them to agree? So we didn't have funding for this research and you might be surprised by that, but we didn't have funding to do this research. How did we do it? Well, with quite a lot of experimental psychology, it's cheap. You learn a lot about processes and it's really the first stage in a series of experiments which could get more expensive, especially if there's any kind souls here who'd like to fund our research. But the idea is that we did it with the help of our undergraduate students. So it's students in the university who are participants. The media likes to call them guinea pigs. I hate that idea. And they do the experiments with us. It was Akira and I, we booked a room. So it's very cheap. We made like response booklets. They all sat at a table, writing words over and over and over again. And then so it's cheap to run. And then it does have value for funding and that's what we're looking for at the moment. The idea is that what we understand about these feelings of strangeness and these conscious experiences, which as I say are called metacognition, that can help us understand all kinds of different sorts of psychological distress and cognitive problems. So that part would be fundable, just asking people to write the same word over and over and over again. That's not, that's not fundable. Akira, do you have questions for anybody? Pieto. Yeah, excuse me. Yeah, I have one for Christine. So do you have any evidence that, you know, the asymmetry in the hairs in your nose correlates with other asymmetries in your body or put it that way? Can we, from looking at the hairs in our nostrils, can we learn or predict something about all the parts of your body or health? Yeah, I wish I could say I know, but I was looking into data about that and there's just not much data about nose hairs and how it correlates with the rest of the body. So, you know, this is why we're doing the research and we're gonna pivot from there and hopefully we'll find more stuff, but so far we don't know much yet. But you were saying that the difference between the two nostrils is maybe not statistically significant? Yeah, not statistically significant. So it's very, very similar in both nostrils. It's really off by just eight hairs based on our data of about 20 people. So very similar, but everyone has a little bit of variation all over our body. You'll notice like, you know, one eyebrow is a little bit higher. I have one monolid, one double eyelid. I'm sure I probably have one nostril with more hairs than the other, but I guess. Do you know which one? I'll have to pluck it out and see. Then I'll let you know. But yeah, see symmetry is very normal. We have time for maybe one quick question from each of you. Christine, one quick final question for anybody. I'm curious, have you ever thought about your nose hairs? Not until tonight. Well, I hope I inspired you. The Atobe? One final question. So do you think this will open a new field of research on nostrils? Also, maybe can we use them to predict the future of people like people look under Iris? I think so. I firmly believe in that. But yes, hopefully it does. If you look in medical literature, there's no section on nose hairs. So hopefully this will add in like at least a couple of lines in there and then we'll get more info in there. Well, Bietta, what's next for you? Different species, different locations or how's it going to work? So when people ask me about that, is that I would say I never would recommend anyone to study biological mixing in the ocean because every time you try to find it, you never find it. You find it when you are not looking for it. But I think the place to look at the moment could be like in the high latitude oceans where you have this thin layer of fresh water that creates a very stratified layer and there are also a lot of creel. So if there is one place in the world where I would look for it is down in the southern ocean maybe. But otherwise you can back to the day job which is algae, is that right? So it's, yeah, no? Yeah, more ocean turbulence in general. Okay. We have about one minute left. So anybody have one final quick question? We could all just say the for a minute. No? I'm not saying you can do that though. Okay, everybody seated comfortably. One of our winners has given birth, as you can see. He's assisted. In this second discussion group, here's who we have. Katie Tam, Katie, if you'd stand and take a bow. Katie traveled here today from Toronto, Canada. She and her team won the Ig Nobel Education Prize for methodically studying the boredom of teachers and students. Take a bow. And her colleague, Christian Chan, also is with us and Christian will be in a later discussion group but Christian, take a bow. Miguel Gilcote is here from, he traveled from Vigo, Spain. And Miguel and his team won the physics prize. You've already met one of his colleagues. They're the ones who measured the extent to which ocean water mixing is affected by the sexual activity of anchovies. So yet again, please take a bow. And get to the top. And Adolfo Garcia, Adolfo traveled here from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Adolfo and his team won the Ig Nobel Communications Prize for studying the mental activities of people who are expert at speaking backward. Eric Masson also will be helping out with this discussion and the discussion will be compared by Karen Hopkins. Karen. I think we have to start with the one minute talks. Did you want to intro? I always tell people we screw up more than you think we will. So if you're keeping count, add one to whatever your count already is. To give us some context, we're going to begin with one minute lectures by the two people here from prizes you have not yet heard a lecture on. First, Katie Tan. Hello, everyone. In keeping with the theme of our boredom research, I'm going to deliver an absolutely boring, mind-numbing one-minute summary of our findings. And guess what? If you're anticipating to be bored, you will very likely be. In our first paper cited by the award committee, we explored students' expectations in university lecture and lab experiments. We found that the mere expectation that a lecture will be boring can intensify boredom. And that's not it. In our second paper, we dived into the relationship between teacher and student boredom. In a two-week diary study, we found that when teachers felt bored, students tended to report lower learning motivation. And when students thought that their teachers were bored, they were also more likely to be bored and have less motivation to learn. I hope our research can inspire you about the depth of boredom in class. Thank you. And now, one-minute summary of the work done by his team, Adolfo Garcia. Don't count that toward the one-minute. Or voilà. So, you know how people sometimes get together in language meetups? They meet, you know, for breakfast and they speak in French or Korean or whatever? Well, in Argentina, we found a group of people who got together to speak backwards over coffee. And we said, okay, they all thought that it was a very stupid and useless skill. We confirmed that it's stupid, but it's not useless because it gives you insights into something that's fundamental. When you wanna say cat, there's something in your brain that makes you say cat and not act or tack. That's called phonotaxis. It's what allows you to sequence sounds when you're talking. And these people are experts at sequencing sounds. That's what they do. They excel at it. So we scanned their brains and we found that this ability that we have to sequence phonemes based on their unusual expertise recruits specific temporal, frontal, and occipital parts of their brains and connections they're from. Now the Nobel Prize winners will ask each other questions about their work. Karen? I guess why don't we start with Eric again since you were very good the first time. Now you put all the pressure on me. So a question for Adolfo. These people who can talk backwards, was this something that they were born with that they have to develop it? How did they even come upon this skill? Boredom. They all say that it's a little quirky mental game that they sort of indulged in. And I think we can all relate to that. I mean, there are people who are constantly doing maths in their heads, right? I myself, I'm always counting syllables. These people, they would look at a signboard and they would just flip words around and see what that would sound like. So it wasn't something that they were born with. It's not something dysfunctional. They can control it. But it is something a little bit weird in the sense that it's very compulsive. They can't help themselves. It sort of overtakes them. And they all describe different strategies that they have for it. Some of them, they visualize words in their minds, right? And they flip the letters around. And some others, they do it just based purely on sound. So are they particularly good Scrabble players? That we don't know. But we did confirm that as we expected, they have very, very good working memories in general. So if I give you guys a set of numbers now, I tell you 3, 14. Say it. Now I tell you 19, 25, 18. Now I tell you 45, 16, 16, 92. Now I tell you 55, 63, 7, 49, 98. It's getting trickier, right? I'm loading your working memory. Now these guys, it's not that they just flip around single words. They can speak backwards. They'll tell you what they did yesterday, backwards. And they take a lot of planning. You have to remember all those things that you wanna say in order to flip them around. So they had developed astonishing working memory skills. And that was another thing that differentiated them from non-backward speakers. I wonder if they can do it in German. So Adolfo, do you have a question for someone? Yes, yes I do. The Antovi sex thing. So they seem to influence the ocean, oceanic activity, let's say. So my question is, what's going on during tidal waves? During tidal waves, what happens with the turbulence or with the anchovies? You choose the way you wanna take this. Okay, imagine a tidal waves on the night with anchovies. That is a blast. It can change this whole current system of our oceans. I'm joking over here. Miguel, do you have a question? Yeah, I have a question for Adolfo. Can you take one? I can. I mean, there are several tech companies, I think that they are developing these devices to read our minds. You think that the techniques you used in your paper and the knowledge you gained with that could help in that direction? Maybe as they ask here several times, maybe a founding opportunity. All right, so what we did here, they were offline brain scans. So we were not looking at these people's brain activity while they were reversing speech. So we assessed their capacity to speak backwards and then we took a look at brain activity and brain structure, but not while they were doing it. These technologies are being devised to actually read your mind in a way they require online brain scans. So you need to think about something and we need to see what patterns of brain activity are happening as we were thinking about that or as you're reading a text. So that we can train models then to predict what you were thinking about just based on your brain activity. So not based on what we did. And I actually would wonder about the benefits of having something that can scan the way in which you can speak backwards. But if there's funding for that, the world has become very weird. Katie, do you have a question? Yeah, also for Adolfo, like it's related to legal questions, like is there any potential applications for your findings for people with language related disorder? That's a good point. There are different speech and language dysfunctions that happen to people who have perhaps sustained stroke or with neurodegenerative diseases, mostly seen in aphasias, which are neural disorders of language. And one of the symptoms that you see more often are known as paraphasias, which are changes in what you say does not match what you wanted to say. Many of these, they are sound based. So you want to say cat, but you end up saying pack, right? To understand the brain mechanisms that are responsible for sequencing phonemes might give you an insight of which brain regions you might want to stimulate or target in your therapeutic approaches for people who have these types of these functions. And who has a question for Katie? Eric? Another researcher type question. How do you measure boredom? Is it entirely self-reported or is there some objective way? Yeah, in our research, we mostly measure it self-reported. On a scale of one to seven, how bored you are. But have you thought perhaps of going a different route and seeing what the brainwave activity is? Yeah, there are some researchers to try to measure boredom. Like for example, for eye tracking, like neuropsychological, like brain scanning. Yeah, I need to get there, yeah. As a writer, I had a really quick question for Katie. In the article on anticipation of boredom, the first sentence of your article is, how boring do you expect this article to be? And what draft did that arise? And who inserted that in there? That's good stuff. Yeah, because I wrote that sentence because I write a lot and then sometimes I get bored by my own writing. So I believe the reader gets bored, too. So I just ask them right away. Katie, do you have another question for Riko? Yeah, for Riko. Because your research, you spend 14 days on the ship, on the sea, what was the key challenge when you were collecting data on the sea? Normally, the key challenge is to keep everything going because all the time the equipment are failing, the environment is quite harsh. So normally you are quite focused on everything is working fine because you have this tight schedule to sampling everything. The ship time is quite expensive, so you want to keep taking as much as possible. And you will not have opportunity later in the lab to correct what was done wrong during the survey. Before I forget, does someone have a question for Alan? Alan, hello. Did you talk sometimes Spanish? Spanish is the best. Alan, do you sometimes talk to your father when you don't want to know what you think? Alan, did you talk sometimes backwards to your father when you don't want that he knows what you are thinking about? So cute. Did Alan have a question for someone? Yeah, he just told me one. So for the bottom study, if you create a fun experiment, then you are tampering with your hypothesis. But if your experiment was boring, then you have a confound. How did you manage to create an experiment that was neither fun nor boring? Actually, that is not very difficult. We just give them a neutral video, like a lecture that is not too boring, too interesting. And then we pilot test it, whether it increases or reduces the bottom. If that didn't alter the bottom, then it's kind of neutral. But I can claim myself to be an expert for making people for it. I do also asking participants to copy references or just memorizing phone numbers. That's kind of really can bore people very effectively. If you need someone to bore your participants, I'm available, yeah. Did you have another question, Adolfo, for someone? Yes, for Eric. So what's the main difference between a Nobel Prize and an Ig Nobel Prize? Around here, the Ig Nobel counts for more. Eric, did you have any other burning questions? I'm still interested in these anchovies. So it was a surprise to you. You were not expecting the... How did you determine in the end that it was the anchovies? How did you narrow it down? Well, we could take some eggs and the experts in fishes, they know that that eggs belongs to anchovies. And we did also some sampling with some equipment, that the signal that they registered, it seems to be from anchovies. So we didn't know anything about anchovies. But now we know that they have sex on the night. You must know some other dark secrets about anchovies, too, right? I can't tell you. I think earlier you mentioned to me that you're not an expert on fish orgies, so... Miguel, did you have another question for someone? Yeah, I think that from Adolfo, if we mix studies and we think of double negative, do you think if I repeat several times a word, backwards, it will be a deja vu? No. Katie, did you have anything else? Yeah, I'm curious. You studied anchovies this time, do you have fishers in the future? Well, now I passed to mussels. I'm studying mussels now. I don't know if I will take fishes again, but now I'm studying a little bit of mussels. Do mussels... Have sex? Make turbulence. Yes, they open the valves. So, yeah. Alan likes that. Adolfo, did you have any other questions? Yes. What's the next frontier in anchovy sex research? Well, not sure. I could study another behavior of the anchovies, but I would prefer to fix my attention on turbulence and mixing. I think that's quite important for climate change. I'm going to start with Miguel. We have just a couple of minutes left. What sort of collaborations do you envision with your fellow ignoble prize winners? Well, I think that now instead of going to fishes, I will start to use another technique, bulbometry, to see if there is any signal in the opening and closing of the valves of mussels when they are responding. Katie. I would say whether being on the sea collecting data, whether you get boards, collecting data is on the sea for anchovy sex. And also, where the backwards speaking, it's less boring. Well, it was a very amusing study, to be honest. Nothing close to anchovy sex, but still quite entertaining. But in terms of the collaboration, I think this panel here is just begging for us to do the backward boring anchovy sex study. I think that's good. Now we drop the ceremonial drop of a water bottle, signals us to move on to group three. Let me introduce the people who are here for this discussion group. Tiffé Yap, stand and take a bow. Tiffé has traveled here from Houston, Texas. She and her team won the mechanical engineering prize for reanimating dead spiders to use as mechanical gripping tools. What are you holding in your hand? A microphone, please. Oh, sorry. To speak, not for the object. I have a toy spider with me, not the real one today. Could you briefly explain the parts of it so that everybody has enough information that they can understand your research? Okay, so this is the one. Tell us the parts of that spider. Okay, so here we have a spider, and we have the prosoma of the spider at the top, and then at the bottom we have the abdomen, and these are their individual legs, eight legs of the spider. We just met Tiffé Yap, meet Akira O'Connor, Akira with Chris Mulan, who you met before, and their team won the Ig Nobel Literature Prize for studying the sensations people feel when they repeat a single word. Many, many, many, many, many, many, many times. He has traveled here today from St. Andrews, Scotland. I get to take another bow. And Homei Miyashita has traveled here from Kanagawa, Japan. He and his colleague won the Ig Nobel Nutrition Prize for experiments to determine how electrified chopsticks and drinking straws can change the taste of food. Okay, yeah, I already have. And Eric Masken will be a part of the discussion. Danny Adams will lead it, and we'll begin with one minute lectures, really, by the people from the two prizes you have not heard discussions of before. First, Tiffé, yeah, one minute discussion. Okay. I would like the audience to please grip tight to their seats because I'll be talking about how we turn inanimate spiders into robotic grippers. So we are soft roboticists, so we try to make robots that are soft. And we're always looking to find new and interesting materials that can simplify the fabrication process of robots. So in traditional manufacturing, usually the manufacturing process is very complicated at many steps. So we thought of this clever idea to use biotic materials, which are inanimate materials that are derived from nature. And in our case, we have a dead spider, and we directly use it as a robotic component in our work. Thank you. And now a one-minute summary of his prize-winning work by Homei Miyashita. Okay. Okay. Have you ever licked a battery? Yeah, of course I have. And if you know, if you have, you know the electricity has a taste because it, you know, stimulates the electric, sorry, tastes bad, tastes receptors. And so for 13 years, we've been researching about the use of electricity to that kind of tableware to control the taste of food. And not only the stimulation, we move the ions in the food or in the mouse. And by gathering the sodium ions near the tongue, it can enhance the saltiness of food, especially low sodium food. So, yeah, it contributes to health. Thank you so much. And now the Ig Nobel Prize winners will ask each other questions about their work. Danny? Kira, I'm going to put you on the spot. I'm going to go first. Okay. I have a question for Tefei, which is, is it only spiders that you can do this with or can you do this with other animals? So currently with our method, we rely on the hydraulic mechanism that spiders do have. So other insects do not have this mechanism, but there are other insects such as whip scorpion and even mites that have this hydraulic mechanism that you could probably think of using this. Okay, so really nice creatures, then. Yes. So you can add another function using scorpions, for example, cutting... Yeah, a little. Yes, maybe. But so related to that, is it... So I noticed with your video, with the demonstration, it's a fairly straightforward kind of grabbing mechanism where all of the legs operate at the same time. Is it possible to kind of isolate individual components, legs, so you can do perhaps more precise actions? Yeah, so currently the spiders that did, they lose control over their vows in each leg. So that's why when we pressurize it, all the legs open up. So currently we're looking into different methods of trying to have this single leg actuation to study maybe the joints, how the pressure affects the joint of the angle, and even achieve local motion of the spiders. It's all about your progress. Wow. Would you like to ask Komi a question about his electronic... From me? I'm sorry, no. What is your favorite food that you have ate using your chopsticks in bowl? First of all, I like ramen, especially in Japanese shio ramen, it means salty ramen. And there is a low-salt shio ramen in Japan, but it is not so good. So yeah, to eat that, I developed the new type, the bowl type equipment. And because I want to use not this equipment, I want to use vari-bashi. So yeah, I attached the equipment to the bowl, not to the tableware in here. So you know, Japanese people hold the bowl with left hand. So that's the mechanism. Really cool. Thank you. Would you show off your little wrist thing there? Oh yeah. Oh yeah, okay. Yes, it was very difficult to explain using a mic. Can we have you hold the mic? Oh, thank you. I can have you hold the mic. Oh, thank you. This notice, this is a mic that magnifies the sound and this is a chopsticks that magnifies the taste. Okay, so okay, this is a smart watch like device and the band is a conductive rubber. And when I turn on the, I can control the level and select the waveform. And by connecting it in the single wire and when I eat in this way. So electrical flows from chopsticks to the food, to the food, to the tongue, and the two to the body and flows into my arm and back, back. So using that electricity, we control the taste. Super cool. Thank you guys. Do you have a special name for that circuit? Yes, it's a product name. It's called electric salt. Electric salt? Electric salt, okay. How many, do you have a question? Oh, yes, to Akira or? Anybody you want. Okay. I see. I see, yeah, the distance is very different. Okay. I like the title of your thesis. You know, it's humorous and, you know, it's very, I mean, sorry, accurate. So I think that's a perfect name of the title, but I'd like to know if there are other options of varieties of titles. Yes. Yeah. Thank you for asking that question. So in case you didn't notice when the study title page was shown, I think the first phrase in the study is the induction of Jamais Vu. And this was a title that when Chris and I sat down to work on the paper, Chris was very keen on this title. It was Chris's idea. But to answer your question directly, there was an alternate version, which had 28 vurs, because that was the average number of vurs required to generate Jamais Vu in people. Now, this has had some interesting consequences. We got some confused emails from copy editors. And Chris was telling me yesterday that one of his colleagues had chastised, I think, one of Chris's students for clearly messing up her references, because she'd repeated a few too many words in her reference list. So it's had some interesting consequences. It's been a good topic for conversation as well, a good conversation starter. So yeah, I think Chris was absolutely right to suggest very strongly that we went with that title. Was one of the hurdles, like the word count for titles and journals? I think it was just getting over the copy editors and kind of the perceptions of our incompetence in choosing a title. I actually just want to follow up a little bit. All three of you have some wonderful phrases, just the first, not just the, the, the, the, the. So I was particularly entranced by interpretive seizure. And then in the title, word alienation and semantic satiation. Please, explicate. So there's a long history, actually, of this sort of research. When Chris and I were working on this in the early 2000s, we thought we'd, we'd happened to cross something that was, that was quirky and interesting and that we were going to report it for the first time in the scientific literature. And it was only after presenting, presenting, I think, a talk at a conference that we had a professor, a professor who would go on to examine my PhD thesis. He spoke to Chris and he said, well, I know you've, you've spoken about this as something novel and it, it is very interesting, but it isn't novel. In 1904, there had been a team of researchers who had published on this using, using these phrases that, that you picked out and had, had described exactly what we thought we were describing for the first time. Now there's a kind of interesting angle to this, I think, in that this was a team of, of female researchers. So it was a team of two women. And it was not, not just any old women, but one of those women was Margaret Floyd Washburn, who is the first recipient of a PhD in psychology from an American university, and the second female president of the APA. So it was surprising, I guess, that, that her work had fallen out of, out of fashion within psychology. But she, she predicted this in one of her APA addresses. She said that the rising kind of tide of, of behaviorism, of, of being focused on measuring things objectively and moving away from introspection within psychology was, was going to see research like hers forgotten. And so it was, that was exactly what happened. She was very prescient in, in predicting that. I think there's, there's a lot to be said about the, the kind of feminization and masculinization of certain, certain aspects of psychology and who we therefore choose to kind of remember in the canon of science. But I think the first step to putting that right is to, to kind of acknowledge that, that there's some great research that has been done by, by people that we don't remember. And it is really important to let people know about. Yeah, that's a great point. So yeah, semantic satiation. The, that was a, that was a term that would, that has been used to describe this feeling as, as, as are some of the other terms that, that you mentioned as well. So we were hitting our keywords there as well. Eric, did you have anything for, for anybody? Question for, for Hope A. Do you, do you see, this is again something a researcher would ask. Do you see any commercial possibilities? Yes, in Japan it is commercially available next month. Okay, congratulations. And, and, and do you have, do you have a patents for it? Yes, a little bit, a little bit. Very good. Home, I actually want to bring you to the first sentence of your paper. I forgot that. Catfish are described as swimming tongues. Yeah, yeah. They, they are known, are they electric fish as well? Yes, I, you know, I'm not a researcher of, of that field. Okay. Yes, but, you know. You need the intro. Yeah, I, I like to, you know, you know, he made a good title. For me, the first sentence is, is, should be very impressive. So, yeah. So, the most impressive knowledge about taste was that. Okay. Do you have a follow up question for somebody? Oh, yeah. To you. Okay. You know, it's a little bit difficult. The question is simple. I hope that I have ever had an argument with a journalist from, from the media, but because I, you know, for example, I have many experience of the argument with journalists, you know, maybe some people said this electric shock or something or, you know, it's, it's a, it's different. You know, so, but, and especially I, I think your research is very great and, you know, for example, we regularly use wood or we regularly would use wool. So, it's dead organisms, you know. So, so it's, it's very great. If the materials that's useful for robotics are cheap and available everywhere. So, I think our research is very great. However, however, when, when I, when I see that some kind of news of ignoble price, I, I, no, I don't know. I don't know. So you have to argument with that journalist. So I thought, so have you ever experienced? I think most journalists are quite nice. Most people do ask about the ethics and we will try to explain it as we do follow some scientific procedure with the utilization of the spiders. There are memes and mean tweets online, but I think there was those were the extents. But most, mostly everyone are really supportive and really excited about the work like you. Thank you for the question. I've, I've usually worked with vertebrate animals and I, it's amazing to me that people care about wolf spiders. Where's, where's our arachnophobe? Okay. You also have some, you actually, there's a, a crossover with your work and mine actually. So I study electricity and one of my very favorite stories is how Venus fly traps snap shut. And you mentioned that actually that that's an interesting, it's a, it's a biophysics story. That's a really interesting one. Do you know much about them? Can you, can you talk, are you going to use Venus fly traps as grippers? Yeah. So there's actually some work out there that some researchers have used a Venus fly trap and use electricity to use it as a gripper. And there's a lot of bio inspired work where they have looked at the mechanisms for Venus fly traps where they have like the trigger hairs, I think. And they use that to create really quick snap true instability to create like a gripper. So people have done that. They have. That's amazing. People would be so anxious about. Thank you very much. Thank you. And now the shy people. The final group of Ignaval Prize winners. Dan, is that a spider you have with you? Yes. It's the same one that Tiffay showed us earlier, the plush spider. Now you did your work before you moved down to Houston. You did your previous study and work here at MIT. Is that correct? Yes. I had five years at MIT for the PhD and then I had a couple of years also at Harvard for a postdoc. Did you leave any spiders behind up here? We didn't start the spider work up here. I did see a lot of dead spiders, especially at Harvard. I think MIT in my view is a little bit cleaner. You've just heard valuable information, all of you in the audience. Let me introduce the four Ignaval Prize winners in this final group. Natasha Mesinkowska. Please stand and take a round of applause. She traveled here from Irvine, California. She's the leader of the group that won the Ignaval Medicine Prize for the work with cadavers and their nostril hair. All right. Dan Preston traveled here from Houston, Texas. He's the leader of the group that won the Ignaval Mechanical Engineering Prize for the work with reanimating dead spiders. Christian Chan traveled here from... Take a bow. Traveled here from Tokyo, Japan. The team originally was based and did their work at the University of Hong Kong in Hong Kong and now they have scattered to various places. They won the education prize for something you've heard a little about for mechanically... methodically studying the boredom of teachers and students. Another bow. And please welcome Sung Min Park. Sung Min was based at Stanford University until recently he has just begun a new job at a university in Singapore and he traveled here today from Singapore for this. Please remain standing while I describe your prize. Dr. Sung Min Park, he's a physician, won the Ignaval Public Health Prize for inventing the Stanford Toilet, a device that uses a variety of technologies, including a year analysis dipstick test strip, a computer vision system for defecation analysis, an anal print sensor paired with an identification camera, and a telecommunications link all to monitor and quickly analyze the substances that humans excrete. Eric Masken will be a part of this discussion also. You've heard one minute summaries of all the other research but you haven't heard about the Stanford Toilet. So here we'll begin with a one minute summary of his research work by Sung Min Park. Okay, this is precision health, can you hear me? Okay, so this is a Stanford healthcare toilet so it meant to monitor your bowel movements and all activity that you're doing on the toilet. But the one important thing is you have to not discriminate, I mean distinguish people who's using the toilet because it meant to monitor your health, right? You don't want to mix up with your family member. So we use a fingerprint scanner at the flusher. So after you're finishing it, you flush it and your identification will be annotated. And we're using the anal print technology that looking at your anus that match to you because it's as unique as your fingerprints. So we have lots of ethical consideration and we have some application to the COVID-19. So it's another era of technology that's infiltrate your toilet. Thank you. You take a bow for that. Oh, yes, yes. Don't waste your waste. Let's start with Natasha. Natasha, do you have a question for Sung Min? I mean seriously, like that's some crazy stuff. So you are responsible for my paranoia of toilets now. I double look down because I mean, I don't know. But here's the thing. So you say that anal prints are very unique. Somebody pops a baby or two. They have hemorrhoids. What just happened to my anal prints, sir? Yes, I think the anal print technology will have some impactful stuff on it because we're trying to detect any kind of anomaly from your anus. So as soon as you have a hemorrhoid or anal fissures or any other conditions that it's not normal, we're detecting it and notifying you that you have to meet a doctor. So that's our strategy. So it's just like the same as your like a face, what do you call? Face ID. Because face ID usually accepts you whenever you wear a glass. Even though you wear a mask, it still accepts you as you, right? But my phone doesn't open every time. Yeah, that's true. So anal print is kind of similar technology. If morphology slightly changed, but we know it's someone's and if we detect anything different, we can notify you to see a doctor. Thank you so much. So Min, do you have a question for Dan? Oh, yes. So it was very fascinating work. So it's kind of, I usually play the game. The video game that's called Diablo II and it always remind me of Necromancer over there. Reanimate, right? So do you have any plan to to make an Iron Man type of Spider-Man? So definitely for the Spiders themselves, as Tiffay mentioned earlier, we're trying to work on the individual actuation of each leg such that we can get locomotion and then we could think of the Spider with maybe the little backpack, right? With some instrumentation, it could walk around and maybe surveil or take data, something like this. So maybe that's the Spider version, right? Of this Iron Man suit. But so was that how you want to change humanity? Like, I feel like, okay, so here's the thing. We torture the young docs with these crazy ideas, but I feel like we all come from a good place, right? So how do you want to change humanity with the stuff you're doing? Yeah, I mean, this is a really important question. And so I think that the timeline, maybe to see Necrobotics change humanity could be a little bit longer, or maybe it won't change humanity in the long run. We think that it's important to be creative about the ideas that we explore to give the chance that maybe it could have an impact in the future. But I'll mention that we have a couple of things, of course, that maybe have the more near-term impact. A lot of the work that we're doing in the Soft Robotics is enabling assistive technologies for wearables that people are able to use now, or maybe in the next few years, to help with mobility limitations. That's enough. Good talk. Thanks. Dan, would you have a question that Christian Chan might find so challenging that he finds it interesting? I'll do my best. I was wondering about the study. People seem to have maybe different interests or proclivities, things that they like. Maybe some people like a certain subject for a lecture. Maybe other people like a different subject. So what sort of separates this from just maybe hearing the topic of the lecture, thinking that you might be bored because you have experienced many times in the past being bored with this topic and then being bored by the topic? Well, so of course there are different layers of individual differences. That's why we want to do experiments in a systematic way with multiple participants. Hopefully, through randomization, it will cancel out each other even if there's some individual differences in proclivity, what they're interested in. But we try to do both in the classroom and in the lab. In the classroom, in some cases, I'm actually the lecturer, but I'm not boring to begin with. So if there's any boredom in there, it's the students from, I think. Christian, do you have any questions about nostril hairs? Yes, why wouldn't I? Do you think there's something to do with handedness such that those who are right-handed might have fewer nostril hair because they're picking their nose with their right hand? Listen, so this is how this whole study came about. No, seriously, as a physician, I can't prescribe anything anymore. Like, I want to give you something, your insurance company is going to be like, forget about it. Let me tell you what you need to get. So the condition that Dr. Pham mentioned, Christine, is that alpissiariata, for which there are new medications that are coming out, right? So if you want to give these medications, the companies say it's only to grow hair. You're not allowed to use this medication. So I was literally like digging for reasons to give them a reason to give me the medications. The patients with alpissiariata, about more than half, especially kids, have a lot of allergies, a lot of asthma, and a lot of them drip and have no nose hairs. So we're like, is there anything that these nose hairs do? Can we claim like, hey, this kid does not have nose hairs. So just please give him the medication. So that's how it all started. So when people are like, oh, this is funny and stupid, I'm like, no, we had to be creative. And we went through all the great anatomy and nobody ever said a single thing about nose hairs. There's nothing. So we called all my ENT colleagues there, like it's just in the way. But things that we found out, for example, if you've been through chemo, so people from the cadavers that pass with cancers didn't have any nose hairs. So what does that put you for risk time, right? Laterality, we try to prove. We know that on the scalp one side of the head has a little bit more than the other side, right? There is that difference in hair. I haven't really noticed in our other body parts, but that's what I have to say to kind of like defend that whole like, the human aspect to the fun stuff that we do. So there's a lot of talking for everyone. Eric, can I ask it? I wonder if you might have four quick questions or comments to give an economic perspective on each of these four pieces of research. Gosh, that's its whole order. Well, economists are always interested in marketing, and so I was intrigued to hear in the last panel how the chopsticks were going to be marketed. But I wonder... Oh, yes, we have a... We have a Stanford toilet with us. So is this going on the market? And for that matter, can we expect hydraulic... Can we expect spiders used for hydraulics and gripping to go on the market? I thought you were suggesting that they combine... a combination of spider that captures stool samples. There we go. So we're on the market too. We are. Are you allowed to use the Stanford name? I don't think so. But don't collect proceeds probably because you did it while you were there. So use it. We're working with the electric bidet company right now to make it commercialized, actually. So I think we hope we can release the first version in next year. But it doesn't have an anal print technology on it. I have a question for... Because you're an expert in the game theory, right? So we're having difficult times to recruit the participant for anal print. Before you go further, we have a room full of people. Any volunteers here? We compensate, actually. We compensate for... We're getting back into economics. How much do you compensate? So that was my question. So what's the game theory point of view? How much should I compensate them? The idea, the game theoretic point of view is to make it a competition. Yeah. Christian, your comments on this? Well, we are always bored sitting on the toilet. Well, the discussion you've just heard, do you think this conceivably might interest students who are not terribly interested in other things? And they are interested in their own feces? Maybe we should not pursue this. Or other people's? Yeah. But yeah, we should pay attention to... And when you pay attention, you don't get bored. So when you start paying attention, maybe you won't be so bored of your own waste. Did you know that Dr. Park was compared to Salvador Dali at one point? Do you want to elaborate on that, Dr. Park? Oh yes, Salvador Dali was so much obsessed with the human anus. So he investigated the human anus. So he counted the number of creases around it. And he concluded that there's 35 to 37 creases around it. But it's as unique as a fingerprint. So we're kind of inspired by that, you know, that idea. But as I mentioned, we have a really difficult time to find, you know, participants. So we just utilized some medical depository to... We're working with a colorectal surgeon. So they provided, like, more than 100 images of the human anus. So we conclude that it's very unique. Okay. Sumim, I have been asked many questions because I'm connected with the prize. And I'm sure you've been asked many, many more of it. It should be discussed by you. Could you talk a little bit more about some of the privacy concerns? Oh yes. Yes, privacy. Yes. So the biggest issue is that the toilet itself is regarded as your sanctuary for privacy, right? Because all the privacy starts from your toilet because you don't want to get invaded by somebody else. So that's the definition of privacy. And we're actually trying to install sensors that monitor your activity, right? That actually contradicts to each other. So for the privacy-wise, we always discuss it. It's more like a game theory, too, again. So what's the benefit that we can provide and what's the potential infringement of your privacy? So we're always, like, you know, balancing between the two. But the thing is we need to prove it worthy of your health monitoring. So that's what we're working on. Natasha, you have a question. So you know how there's a shy bladder? Is there, like, a shy anus? I don't know, like, yeah. I'm being honest. Is there? Because you guys are monitoring everybody. For anybody who's not familiar with the term, could you... Shy, like, how you can't... Like, if there's people talking, you can't use the... You can't pee in the public bath. Am I the only one? Okay, anyway, so Eric... No comment. No, so there's these documentaries about, like, how people win the lottery and how, like, their life is okay for a year, but it all goes downhill, like, super heartbreaking. What happens to a Nobel Prize winner after you win? We end up on a panel like this. Could you clarify your question? Is your question connected to the previous discussion? The previous discussion. Game me. How else could I have had the pleasure of sitting with all of you tonight without a Nobel Prize? I mean, it's a privilege. Christian, do you have any questions for anybody? Yeah, Daniel, I'll be curious to see pictures of, you know, Halloween costumes coming from your lab. You know, do you have any... Is there any, you know, integration between those two endeavors? We haven't incorporated any of the real spiders or the biotic materials in the costumes, but there have been a few that I've seen. I think that... I didn't really have this as a costume, but when the work came out, my mom sent me a Spider-Man shirt. So it's on people's minds, I guess, you know? Oh, that's cool. Moms are cool. And Dan, would you mind talking for just a moment or two about your personal history of feelings about spiders before you came to this work? I don't love spiders. The work was exciting enough to us that I decided we could have them in the lab. So we have basically a fridge full of spiders that's in the lab. Not a big problem, but, you know, I think that even with the work out and then some of the press that it's gained, I still continue to not like spiders. I think that there's actually been a little bit of karma because after this work came out, I was taking a shower and a pretty big spider just appeared on the wall. It really startled me, and so... Does it bite you? It did not bite me. Ah, we've missed a chance to be a Spider-Man. I took care of the spider. You're saying this was a gripping experience? You couldn't say so. They didn't like that. They did not like that. They're sensible. Just translate it. Yeah. You may be aware we gave an ignoble prize a few years ago to somebody who professionally studies spiders. That is his profession. And he won an ignoble prize because he wrote a paper explaining he discovered that many of the people who study insects, many professional entomologists, are frightened of spiders. Has that been your experience in your recent work? Not so much frightened. We got pretty lucky. And the lead author, T. Fay, who you just heard from, actually is okay with spiders. In fact, hates roaches. Thank you there, I think. And that is the end of the final discussion. We have just a couple of brief things. First, I would like to... Well, let me give our thanks, first of all. I want to thank the MIT Museum for inviting us here and making it possible, especially in this beautiful new building. This is one of the first things happening here. And thank you especially to Kate Silverman Wilson. Kate, could you come and take a quick bow to really make all this happen. Our stage manager, David Kessler, who brought all the pieces together. Smart show, Jockey, Jerry Sullivan. Made all of that happen. Bruce Petchak and the video crew. The Minor Domos, if you come out here for a real quick bow, who made all the moving parts move properly. Michelle Ligori, Roxy Freeman, Elizabeth Kuzner, Susan Cainy. And Kiyoshi Furusawa. Kiyoshi came here from Tokyo today to do this. And a month from now, Kiyoshi will be running a very similar event at a beautiful science museum in Tokyo. Thank you. We look at some of the people you met tonight. Also, I will explain this in a couple of minutes. Meaning will become clear why I'm describing them this way. Ice cream gods, Gus Rancatori and Corky White. Everyone here, there is ice cream in your immediate future. In just a few minutes. Our discussants, Karen Hopkins, Danny Adams, Eric Masken and all of the Ig Nobel Prize winners. Everybody I named, could you please come up and stand here. You can get your cameras out if you like. This is going to be a pointless photo opportunity. So all the winners come here, gather together and align. You can get your moes and DK if you could help align people here. Okay, quickly, quickly. You will never, ever again see this combination of humanity all in one place. You take your pictures now. And I also want to mention that right afterwards you all have lovely printed programs which Jerry Sullivan put together. Again, you'll never see this combination of people again. If you want to get their autographs and create historic items from those pieces of paper feel free to do it. The final thing we're going to do before we go down the hall for ice cream provided by Toscanini's which we'll be doing right down there in a minute before we do that one final thing. Chris Moomin and Akira O'Connor who did the research on words repeated often especially the word the. We'll grab your microphones please, each of you. And they will lead us, all of us, everyone in this room would like to do it in a group recitation repeating the word repeating, repeating, repeating the word the, the, the. So yes, we'll finish with an experiment. We'd like you to pay attention to us. We'll tell you when to stop. So from now on I just want you to say the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the. Right that way from Toscanini's. Thank you all for coming tonight.