Are Lobsters Ambidextrous? (35 page)

FRUSTABLE 1:
Does anyone really like fruitcake?

We heard a disturbing report from Joseph Redman, of Lincoln, Illinois, about nutritional standards in the military:

 

In 1968 and 1969 I served two tours in Vietnam as a helicopter ambulance medic. On many occasions we flew around the clock with no regular breaks for hot meals from the mess hall, which meant our option was to eat C-rations. The typical C-ration meal included a main dish of canned meat, sometimes with potatoes; a can of fruit; a can of cheese and crackers or crackers with peanut butter or jelly; and a can of cake.

The three cakes I remember were pound cake (everyone’s favorite), a nut-cinnamon cake, and fruitcake. The first two were always in short supply. This left great stacks of round, canned fruitcake available for the taking. When one is hungry, one will eat just about anything.

 

Our fighting men and women reduced to scavenging for fruitcakes! And they wonder why morale is bad in the military.

FRUSTABLE 3:
We often hear the cliché: “We use only 10 percent of our brains.” How was it determined that we use 10 percent and not 5 percent or 15 percent?

We heard from two professors who found academic studies that could have been the basis for the cliché. Prof. Michael Levin, of the City College of New York, did some calculations based on the work of neurobiologist Harry Jerison. We’ll save you the gory details and focus on Levin’s conclusions: “The human brain turns out to have about 8.8 billion to the total neurons in the brain is about 1/10.” But Levin offers even more tantalizing evidence:

 

According to Harold Jerison, the relation of brain mass
E
to body mass
P
in the typical mammal is given by
E= .12p
^2/3
. This much brain is assumed to be necessary for housekeeping functions. Anything extra may be assumed to be used for “higher” cognitive functions.

The
ratio
of an animal’s actual brain weight to the brain-weight predicted by the equation is what Jerison calls its “encephalization quotient.” It tells us how many times larger the animal’s brain is than it needs to be for basic housekeeping functions.

The average human male weighs 55,000 grams. Using the above equation, his “expected” brain weight is about 175 grams. The “encephalization quotient” is 7.79—call it 8, or rounding off to the nearest order of magnitude, call it 10. Roughly speaking, we need only 10% of our brains. Of course, what that means is that we need or use only 10% of our brains for the basic functions performed by all mammalian brains. Presumably, the rest is for “higher” functions.

 

Jerison’s early research was conducted in the 1970s, after the birth of our cliché, but this is still fascinating stuff.

Robert P. Vecchio, Franklin D. Schurz Professor of Management at the University of Notre Dame, sent us a copy of some pages from a textbook he read as an undergraduate,
Foundations of Physiological Psychology
, written by Richard F. Thompson.
Could this Frustable have stemmed from a misunderstanding of the physiology of the brain?

 

…Perhaps the greatest source of confounding in the analysis of whole brain tissue is the fact that the majority of cellular elements in brain are not even nerve cells. Ninety percent of the cells in the brain are
glial
cells and only 10 percent are nerve cells…glial cells have often been considered as connective tissue, serving the same general kind of supportive function as connective tissue in most organs.

 

This textbook was reporting on research conducted by J. Nurnberger in 1958 and S. DeRobertis in 1961, well before any of the sources mentioned in
Do Penguins Have Knees?
To be honest, though, more than any insight into this brain stuff, we are dazzled by the fact that Professor Vecchio can remember anything from an old college textbook.

While these scientific studies could, theoretically, have provided the inspiration for the 10% figure, they aren’t well enough known or disseminated to have hatched our cliché. So we continued our search for the phrase in popular culture.

We mentioned in
Do Penguins Have Knees?
that friends of ours swore they had read about the “10%” cliche in a Robert Heinlein novel, but James Gleick thinks he’s now found the passage, and no numbers are involved. In
Citizen of the Galaxy
(1957), a fictional character says, “He proved that most people go all their lives only half awake.” Same idea, but not the nail in the coffin.

That’s why we were so excited when we heard from Allan J. Wilke of Toledo, Ohio:

 

I’ve been involved in a Dale Carnegie course these last few months. Required reading includes
How to Stop Worrying and Start Living
. Mr. Carnegie frequently quotes the psychologist William James. On page 146 of this book, there is a paragraph that reads:

“The renowned William James was speaking of people who had never found themselves when he declared that the average person develops only ten per cent of his or her latent mental abil
ities. ‘Compared to what we ought to be,’ he wrote, ‘we are only half awake. We are making use of only a small part of our physical and mental resources. Stating the thing broadly, human individuals thus live far within their limits. They possess powers of various sorts which they habitually fail to use.’”

 

As is his habit, Carnegie doesn’t cite where he found this quote. But Carnegie’s bestselling book was first published in 1944 and has been taught in courses for nearly fifty years. Who better to spread the word?

Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to confirm the James quote, although in his letter to W. Lutoslawski, in 1906, James comes tantalizingly close:

 

Most people live, whether physically, intellectually, or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They
make use
of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul’s resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.

 

Ultimately, it may not matter whether James actually uttered the words ascribed to him—for it is much more likely that Carnegie, and his disciples, spread the word than James, himself.

But perhaps our favorite new pronouncement on this Frustable came from Matthew Cope of Westmount, Quebec:

 

Sorry, I don’t know who first claimed that we only use 10 percent of our brains. But presumably, whoever it was, there’s a 90 percent chance he was wrong!

 

FRUSTABLE 24:
Where, exactly, did the expression “Blue Plate Special” come from?

We’re hurt. We can’t even convince some readers that blue plate specials were actually served on blue plates. Jan Gable, of Cedar City, Utah, insists that “blue” refers not to the color of the plate but to the collars of the workers who purchased inexpensive, complete meals in diners.

Allison Berlier demurs. Blue doesn’t refer to the plate, she chastises us, but to the food being served!

 

During the depression, the most plentiful, and therefore, cheapest meal available, was the locally caught
bluefish
…

 

Honestly, Jan and Allison, there
were
blue
plates
. Many
live
people remember them. Authors even write about them. In fact, reader Jan Saul notes that Mary Higgins Clark, in her book,
Loves Music, Loves to Dance
, was so inspired:

 

A blue plate used to the special of the evening at a cheap restaurant. Seventy-five cents bought you a hunk of meat, a couple of vegetable, a potato. The plate was sectioned to keep the juices from running together. Your grandfather loved that kind of bargain…

 

Robert Klein, of Paramus, New Jersey, has conducted extensive research into the history of this phrase. He sent along a copy of John Egerton’s discussion of the blue plate special in
Southern Food
. Egerton notes that restaurants featuring blue-plate specials “came early to the region, and many of the best of them have survived to this day, withstanding the fast-food revolution and other gastronomic upheavals.” The typical blue-plate lunch, according to Egerton, consisted of a main dish, three or four vegetables, bread, and a drink, all for one low price. Klein concludes that the blue-plate special probably began in Tennessee or Kentucky during the 1920s.

FRUSTABLE 5:
Why does the traffic in big cities in the United States seem quieter than in big cities in other parts of the world?

Nityanandan Ashwath, who first posed this Frustable, lurked in the bushes until he read our write-up in
Do Penguins Have Knees?
Now he offers three more reasons why foreign traffic seems noisier:

 

1. Most engines in vehicles on a U.S. street are large gasoline-powered four-stroke automobiles. These are inherently the
quietest type of engine ever invented. Most other places have a high percentage of diesels (buses/trucks), two-strokes (scooters), and small four-strokes (motorcycles) that are all much noisier.

2. The smaller vehicles overseas result in a greater density of exhaust population. That is, an observer on a street corner has more individual sources of sound within a 100-yard radius because bikes and minicars take up less street space per unit.

3. Most U.S. cars have automatic transmissions that limit the rpm buildup of the engine during acceleration. Drivers elsewhere have more opportunity for shrieking starts from a traffic light.

 

FRUSTABLE 6:
Why do dogs tilt their heads when you talk to them?

In
Do Penguins Have Knees?
, we heard from readers arguing passionately whether dogs tilt their heads for better vision or better hearing. Reader Fred Lanting wrote with the best discussion reconciling these two viewpoints that we have seen:

 

Dogs have a very poor focusing ability because the fovea (focusing depression) in the retina is less developed for that purpose than, say, the fovea of a hawk…It’s a tradeoff, since dogs have very good night vision and ability to detect motion better than we do. The dog tilts his head for the same reason we do: to get an almost imperceptibly different but significant new perspective—a better 3-D brain image of distance.

The dog uses a
combination
of eyes and ears for this sharpening of the incoming sensory messages. Ears are set apart from each other for a reason: The tiny additional fraction of time it takes sound to reach the second ear tells dogs whence come the sounds. Thus a dog can find you in the dark or behind hiding places if you make a little noise.

He tilts his head even if there’s no noise
we
can hear because he wants to get the benefit of not only sight but any sound that
might
be forthcoming. He’s trying to get all the sensory input he can because he’s very interested in it.

 

One of our favorite correspondents, David Altom of Jefferson, Missouri, wrote to us about his cockapoo, Midnight, who he owned in the 1970s. Like many dogs, Midnight responded not
only to the wail of police sirens outside their home but to the sound of sirens on television:

 

Every time the sound of a police siren came on “Kojak,” “Baretta,” or “McCloud,” Midnight would perk up his ears and tilt his head as if trying to understand that sound. His attention was directed to the speaker, not the picture. Once or twice, he went up and sniffed the TV speaker.

Midnight also had two favorite songs: “Sister Golden Hair” by America and “One of These Nights” by the Eagles…

 

“Sister Golden Hair”? I thought dogs were supposed to have
good
hearing?

FRUSTABLE 7:
Why and where did the notion develop that “fat people are jolly”?

Our 10-percent-of-the-brain expert, Prof. Michael Levin, took us to task for making fun of the validity of somatotypes, developed by William Sheldon about fifty years ago:

 

There are three basic somatotypes: mesomorphic (muscular), ectomorphic (skinny), and endomorphic (fat). A good deal of valid research has established a correlation between mesomorphy and extroversion, aggressiveness and a domineering temperament. Criminals tend overwhelmingly to be mesomorphs, or slightly endomorphic mesomorphs.

…ectomorphs tend to be introverted, inhibited, and restrained. So, comparatively speaking, endomorphs tend to be “jollier” than either mesomorphs or ectomorphs. They are relatively less inclined to try to dominate others, and are relatively less introspective and reserved. The perception of this is probably the origin of the (correct) stereotype of the jolly fat man. (The writer of this letter is mesomorphic, but has no desire to force his opinions on you.)