What have you learned lately?

By Jenny Neyman

Have you stuffed a pea in your ear lately?
Maybe you should. All the cool kids are doing it. And they’re growing up to discover the quasicrystals structure, the accelerating expansion of the universe through observations of distant supernovae, and the dendritic cell and its role in adaptive immunity. Also the precise amount of wasabi needed to release in the air to awaken someone.
Hey, we can’t all be rocket scientists. Or Nobel Prize winners, as the first three are. Discovery is still discovery. As biophysicist Aaron Klug said, “Human curiosity, the urge to know, is a powerful force and is perhaps the best secret weapon of all in the struggle to unravel the workings of the natural world.”
Klug won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1982 for development of “crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of biologically important nucleic acid-protein complexes.”
Try saying that 10 times fast. Then try spelling it.
While the fluid pronunciation, much less a complete understanding of Klug’s advancements in science, may be beyond most of us, we all share the impetus that got him there — the urge to know. That “best secret weapon” in the enterprise of learning.
The think tank behind the airborne wasabi shares it, too. They just employ it in unraveling a different question. In this case, the research team from Japan was attempting to develop an alarm system that would wake people by triggering their sense of smell, rather than hearing. Thus, the wasabi alarm was born. For their efforts, they may very well increase the safety of the hearing impaired, who otherwise might not be alerted to an emergency alarm while they sleep. They also got recognition in the 2011 Ig Nobel Prizes, a parody of the Nobel Prizes.
The Ig Nobels are awarded in the same categories as the Nobels, and for work that involves the same qualities of responsible research, accuracy and integrity, just with an added dose of the ridiculous.
Among other 2011 Ig Nobel winners:
• Physiology Prize, awarded to a team of researchers from the U.K., The Netherlands, Hungary and Austria, for their study, “No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise.”
• Medicine Prize, awarded to a team from The Netherlands, U.K., U.S., Austria and Belgium, for demonstrating that people make better decisions about some kinds of things, but worse decisions about other kinds of things, when they have a strong urge to urinate. (I’m going to assume that standards of modesty along roadsides are one of those nebulous, gotta-go-influenced boundaries.)
• Psychology Prize, awarded to a researcher in Norway for decoding the meaning behind sighing, in his paper, “Is a Sigh ‘Just a Sigh’? Sighs as Emotional Signals and Responses to a Difficult Task.”
• Biology Prize, awarded to Canadian, Australian, U.K. and U.S. researchers for discovering that a certain type of beetle can mistake a certain type of Australian beer bottle as a female beetle and mate with it. Their paper was “Beetles on the Bottle: Male Buprestids Mistake Stubbies for Females.”
• Peace Prize (and my vote for Most Awesome Research of the Year, if there were such a prize) awarded to the mayor of a town in Lithuania, “for demonstrating that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars can be solved by running them over with an armored tank.”
Amen to that, brother, and where do you sign up to be a test driver in that project?
The Ig Nobel winners inevitably take some ribbing with their recognition, but I don’t think that’s fair. For one thing, who would you rather hang out with at a dinner party? The researcher studying the quasicrystals, or the ones documenting the misdirected beetle mating?
Wait, bad example. For those who enjoy cracking a brew at a dinner party, the last thing they’d want to think about is bugs getting busy with their beer bottle.
Either way, they all share a common trait, whether awarded a Nobel or Ig Nobel for their excellence in it. We’ve all got a dose of it, in fact: Curiosity. We just don’t all make as good a use of it as we once did.
Part of the wonder of kids — and knack for causing exhaustion — is their limitless pursuit of knowledge. Their curiosity has no restraints. They don’t know that they’ll never know everything there is to know. They truly are little sponges — just as absorbent, and as smelly if not occasionally rinsed off.
A baby’s sole function is to soak up information, and they are as indiscriminate about the subjects of their investigation as they are the methods. They’ll just as diligently assimilate language and conquer the physics of propulsion, balance and gravity, as they will familiarize their taste buds with dog hair and test the storage capacity of their nostrils and ear canals.
Fast forward a couple of decades, and that curiosity has faded. Sometimes only a little, to where learning is no longer the singular purpose of existence but may still be a joyful hobby; a pursuit worthwhile in its own right. Other times it’s at least still valued in the context of a career, area of particular interest, or when there’s a direct benefit to be gained — like honing poker skills, or discerning the subtle differences between one’s spouse saying, “It’s fine,” and, “I said, it’s fine!”
In other cases, curiosity downshifts even below cruise control. The brakes are applied, and new knowledge is lazily avoided or even belligerently suppressed, especially information that conflicts with patterns of knowledge that have already been formed.
“I don’t know about that,” from an adult is all too often tinged with skepticism. It can be a polite means of refusing whatever novelty is being confronted, from a differing political ideology to a reduced-sodium recipe for cornbread or an assertion that skinny jeans and bat-wing ponchos are the look for fall.
For a baby, “I don’t know about that” is a rallying cry for investigation, to devour the unknown with a thorough fist squishing, drool covering, carpet smearing and contemplative ear canal-poking.
Of course, adults “know better” than kids, right? Long division, tying shoes, that cheap toilet tissue may be a bargain but has little to no value, how to heat dinner without sustaining third-degree burns, and that unused peas go back in the fridge, or possibly to a gluttonous dog, rather than up one’s nose.
All that “knows better” really means is adults are more experienced at using what they know. Somewhere along the cattle prod to adulthood, kids start learning limits to their curiosity. They discover some questions are impolite to ask, that answers sometimes are wrong, that some things are beyond their understanding. They get tangled in all the social repercussions that surround the pursuit, possession and exposition of knowledge. Instead of just wanting to know, they’ll start to care about what others think they know.
They realize they won’t ever know it all, and they’ll come to varying degrees of comfort with that realization. Some will feel secure in knowing what they know, or what they think they know, and leaving the rest for someone else to worry about. A rainbow still shines without the viewer understanding why. Cars start and toilets flush, even if we don’t quite grasp the mechanics. Packages of hot dogs and hot dog buns still come in different quantities, even if no one can explain why.
Others — the airborne wasabi enthusiasts, luxury car-crushing tank drivers and accelerating universe expansion theorists of the world — know they won’t ever know it all, but still want to find out as much as they can.
OK, sure, the answers to some questions have more practical applications than others, to the designators of the Nobel and Ig Nobel prizes, at least. But practicality isn’t always as easy to categorize as those two little “ig” letters suggest. We learn proper pea placement somewhere in our younger years, but somebody, somewhere got curious and decided it was still worthwhile to experiment sticking things in cranial cavities — otherwise, how else do we have hearing aids or congestion-relief nasal sprays?
As Samuel Johnson said, “Curiosity is one of the most permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.”
Then again, Douglas Adams wrote, “A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”
That’s OK too. Curiosity is employed in many ways. Some avenues of inquiry get us to the moon, others to the emergency room. Some are in the running for a Nobel Prize, others for an Ig Nobel. For most of us, just holding onto that kid-like enjoyment of exploring something — giving it a good look, smell, taste, squeeze and, yes, even the occasional poke in the ear, is a prize all on its own.
For me, I’m just hoping curiosity extends to at least a couple people out there wanting to read through a column about curiosity.

Jenny Neyman is reporter and editor for the Redoubt Reporter.