Why Willing to Wait?
First it was the fried chicken. Then a variety of fancy milkshakes. No matter what time it is or how bad the streets smell, there are plenty of people waiting in line for hours to get their hands on the food that everyone’s talking about. If you are not the type of person crazy for trendy foods, you probably wonder why someone would like to wait in a long line just to get a taste of a popular cream tea. There is a bit of psychology behind the craze of waiting before getting one’s chopsticks on a trendy food.
People are born curiosity hunters, especially for fresh ideas, according to some experts. At the sight of a long waiting line, they just can’t help having a try. And when the trendy foods are novel in looks and favors, even innovative in their sales environment, the desire for them is upgraded. All those stimulate people to investigate more—to deal with their curiosity.
In addition, having access to something that is sought out but hard to possess equips people with a feeling that improves their self-definitions. When someone is envied due to something he gained with efforts, his self-worth gets enhanced. Although it is yet to be determined whether the number of likes he receives on the photos of foods he’s posted online is connected with the level of envy from on-lookers, that feeling automatically becomes stronger.
Even more, “mob psychology” comes into play: when many people are doing something—waiting in line for the sought-after milkshakes, for instance —others are eager to be part of the group and share such a type of social familiarity, kind of like the natural pursuit of a sense of belonging. Tasting the same wait-worthy food has something in common.
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How Safe Is Your Bed?
Do you consider your bed a safe place of rest and calm? Do you sink into a mattress after a hard day’s work and feel tension and stress drain away as you rest your weary head on a soft pillow? Well, you might not feel so relaxed if you knew that tiny pests were hiding there! It seems that beds may not be such a good place for our health and happiness — they could actually be making us ill!
Recent studies have shown that bacteria, fungi and dust mites, some smaller than the diameter of a hair, live in our bedding. When we move around in our sleep, we disturb them and they are bounced up into the air — which we then breathe in as we sleep. According to the American Lung Association, four out of five households in the United States now have high levels of dust mites, although it’s not the mites themselves that cause the problems, but their droppings. These are “highly allergenic” according to Dr William Berger, a fellow with the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology. “Even if you aren’t allergic… they can still irritate you, the way pepper would if it blew into your nose and eyes.”
Brendan Boor, Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering, who carries out bed research, also found that bed dust in the air leads to allergies —causing watery eyes, sneezing, coughs and asthma. He has recommended ways to limit our exposure to these boring allergens:
Firstly, he suggests vacuuming your mattress regularly – weekly, or even daily. He also recommends doing away with carpets and washing floors. Using allergen-proof bed covers, he says, can reduce the risk of getting allergies. In addition, washing bedding and pillows frequently can help, as can a portable air cleaner placed near the bed.
If you do as Brendan Boor suggests, you will breathe in cleaner air as you sleep … or will you? Is it really safe for you to go back in your bed?
Rats eat our food or make it so dirty that it isn’t fit for people at all. That’s why people often kill them with poison. After a day or two, they find the poison still there. The rats haven’t touched it, even though it is near the food which they eat. People think they must be clever and cunning（狡猾的）. Some scientists have been trying to find the best way to poison rats. They have watched just what a rat does day and night. They have found out that rats aren’t so clever. They are just very shy.
Rats usually live in holes. They run from these holes to the places where they eat and drink. They have special paths on which they travel each time. So they know their paths quite well.
If anything new, such as stone or wood, is put on the path, the rats won’t go near it at first as they are too frightened. It will take them many days to get over the fear. They are also frightened to go near a place that they know, where something has been taken away. If a path goes around a rock, the rats follow the same path around the rock each time. If the rock is taken away, they will still run around the place where the rock was! They won’t cross the empty place, which is now open to them, even though it would be quicker.
Rats will always keep away from anything unusual to them. That’s why they won’t eat poison on the first or second night. They usually won’t go any-where near it for about four days until they get used to being there. Even then they only eat a little at a time. If people want to kill rats with poison, all they have to do is to leave it out for a few days. Once the rats have got used to it, they will eat it and die.
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Why Ear-worms Get Stuck in Your Head
We all get a sensation when a song, for no apparent reason, refuses to leave your head — in fact we’re no strangers to the dreaded “ear-worm.” But a new study published in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts reveals a fascinating insight into ear-worms, and why some songs are better than others in sticking in our heads by investigating the actual elements of the song that make it catchy in the first place.
To do this, most frequent ear-worms of the participants were entered into a database and compared to songs that had never been reported as an ear-worm at all. The melodic features of the tunes were then analyzed, revealing that ear-worm tunes were typically those songs that have overall melodic shapes common in Western pop music. A classic example of a common contour (音调的升降曲线) pattern is heard in Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, where the first phrase rises in pitch and the second falls. This makes the tune easy to remember and has been exploited in many other nursery rhymes, but also in pop music.
In addition to the melodic shape, the other ingredient to the ear-worm formula is the unusual interval structure. The aim of this is to surpass the listener’s expectations of an average pop song, showing unexpected leaps or more repeated notes than usual. “Our findings show that you can, to some extent, predict which songs are going to get stuck in people’s heads based on the song’s melodic content,” says one of the researchers, “This could help song-writers or advertisers write a jingle (短歌) everyone will remember for days or months afterwards.”
The authors conclude that studies of ear-worms can help explain how the brain works, and improve our understanding in how perception, emotions, memory and spontaneous thoughts behave in different people.
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