I played tennis in high school, and ended up having a pretty solid career. One thing that I always found odd, however, was tennis players’ frequencies to vocally display their disgust. In other high school sports, usually athletes keep their thoughts to themselves, or give teammates constructive advice. Obviously in tennis it’s just you on the court, but does that make people that much more inclined to yell at themselves?

The USTA cited a questionnaire on the subject. It was given to top junior players in America. Already, the results aren’t really worth noting as anything factual as it isn’t a study or experiment, and questionnaires can contain tons of bias. It was designed as well as it could have been, but that doesn’t make a tremendous difference. Anyway, I was interested in finding out what they had to say.

The consensus results were consistent with my personal observations. Losing to someone you should beat is obviously frustrating, and anger in those kinds of matches tends to snowball. Additionally, athletes never really get the chance to watch themselves at an amateur level. Sometimes people never know how they act on the court or field, and that doesn’t discourage bad behavior.

This study provides some facts behind those theories. The study administered electric shocks to its patients, then gave them the option to pay to avoid them, which many took. Later, they were forced to spend 15 minutes alone with their thoughts. After those phases, they were allowed to pick between the two scenarios. 67% of men and 25% of women chose to retake the shock that they had paid to avoid before, rather than spend 15 minutes in solitude again.

That link describes the setup of the experiment, and everything checks out. The results are reliable, and the only question is how well it relates to my overarching theme of tennis. A more useful experiment for my thesis would be to strictly include high school or college tennis players, but let’s pretend the current results are reliable for my scenario. There is quantifiable, psychological proof that being alone in your mind (and on the court) is painfully stressful, and that’s why tennis players show more negative emotion than other athletes.

Of all the things scientists could be working on, I didn’t think this would be one. Marconi Union, with the assistance of science, carefully crafted the “most relaxing song ever” — their song, “Weightless.”

I’m listening to it as I write this, and it’s conceptual construction seems kinda obvious. Long harmonies and a slow, steady pulse have always been staples of late-night or studying music. But this was made by science, dammit, so why has it been labeled as the most relaxing song ever?

Well, relieving stress has a lot to do with the brain and the heart. The song has 60 beats per minute, which subconsciously causes the listener’s heart to match up at that slower, healthy pulse (seriously, I felt it myself, at least until it freaked me out and my heart sped up). A study was ran in the UK that measured stress relief after a bath, a massage, and a listening session to “Weightless.” Of course it showed that the song was most relieving, but no actual statistics or study designs seem to be posted online, so I’m inclined to be a little skeptical about that one. A different study, though, seems reasonable. Forty women were monitored and given challenging puzzles. The group that listened to the song were more effective, but also experienced drowsiness. A sample of forty women doesn’t prove anything with any certainty, but it does support “Weightless”‘s soothingness.

As the only relevant song created with the use of science, it’s fair to say that to date, Marconi Union’s “Weightless” looks to be the most relaxing song ever, but nothing can be decided without a larger experiment. At the very least, I now know it’s a great song to blog to.

Obviously, it’s physiologically safer to wear a helmet than not if you’re gonna get hit in the head. But psychologically, does that security encourage recklessness? While it could, of course, be due to chance, that appears to be why rugby tends to see less concussions than football.

In both sports, it’s more technically sound to wrap up the ballcarrier to bring him down, but all too often in football, a defensive player will launch himself headfirst, looking to make a highlight-reel hit. Coaches from both sports provided insight on the topic, and the consensus seemed to be that the coaches were partially at fault. The way that tackling is taught in the sports are vastly different, although it makes sense that they should be the same. The fact that football players have “extra protection” is the reason for being taught a more violent style of tackling.

Another article about NFL concussions agrees with my hypothesis that the helmets encourage dangerous plays. At a little over 11 concussions per week in the 2012 season, the NFL clearly has an epidemic on its hands.

Studies and statistics back up that the NFL sees more head injuries on tackles than rugby, but an experiment would be a great way to prove whether or not that’s true. That experiment would likely have to be randomly assigned groups of people forced to play the two sports, and measure how often they get concussions… so it wouldn’t happen. Until someone much more creative than I comes up with a doable experiment (something strictly based on psychology? Maybe someone better versed on the subject could comment on this?), observational studies will have to be the basis for why the NFL sees more injuries than professional rugby.

Sticking with my theme of blogging today about color/topics from cracked.com, a condition that sounds super cool/super overwhelming is synesthesia. In laymen’s terms, people with synesthesia can hear colors because of mixed-up cords in their brains.

There is an online community for synesthetes, and the author of the site shares his/her condition, as no two synesthetes’ perceptions are alike. The site’s author can see the colors of letters, and if that’s not the coolest sounding thing, I don’t know what is. 4.4% of people have some form of it, or 1 out of every 23. Now, I know more than 23 people, as does every else, and I’ve never heard of synesthesia. That brings up the question — how hard is it for someone to recognize the condition in themselves, to understand that the way they see things is completely different from everyone else?

My first link is to an article co-written by a synesthete. The anonymous author lists lots of pros and cons. A negative side effect given was to be driving in traffic, and license plates light up and flash as distractingly as can be. A pro, on the other hand, is that listening to classical music with one’s eyes closed has a similar effect, as the listener can see the colors associated with the sounds, and it’s its own light show.

As synesthesia is a mostly harmless medical condition, there aren’t any particularly important questions or experiments that need attending to. However, in a safe setting, seeing sounds is something that I’d love to do. I’m sure if they wanted to, doctors could come up with a way to twist nerves in the brain, but it’d be awesome if a hearing aide-type device existed to synthetically recreate the positives of the condition.

A relatively new (legal!) practice in China involves, yes, being lit on fire to fight chronic illness. With application of certain herbs and a towel doused in alcohol, the theory behind the treatment is the balance of hot and cold becoming reorganized incendiarily.

Patients report the feeling of warmth yet no pain in treatments. Doctors who exercise the practice, Zhang Fenghao included, claim that it can cure stress, indigestion, infertility, and cancer.

The iffy treatment comes with pros and cons. A pro is its low cost, stemming from its household items (minus the herbs). A con is its lack or proof that it does anything. My first link, to a New York Daily Times article, simply states “Several long term studies of that supposed therapy have found little evidence of any effectiveness.” I’m curious as to what those studies are. The easiest construct would be to have one of two randomly assigned groups undergo medically approved treatments and one undergo the fire treatment. That wouldn’t be ethical, however, as it may be succumbing one group to getting worse treatment. Another would be to have both groups undergo the fire treatment, but perform one group’s differently (fake herbs, I guess?).

Regardless, the way it looks now, this fire treatment seems to be a prime example of the importance of scientific proof and the placebo effect. Patients claim that it helps, but without any medical facts backing it up, its popularity may be taking away from people actually getting helpful treatments.

As I’m sure we all learned at some point (though can’t remember specifically when), color is created in our minds after being filtered through cones in our retinas. Obviously, our brains are much more complex than our eyes, so what does this mean for how colors are translated?

The simple answer is that when our eyes see two colors, one overpowers the other. For example, our eyes will either see blue or yellow, not a mixture of the two (and I’m not talking about green).

This blog explains the existence of so-called “impossible colors” — colors that are so alike others, but aren’t able to be picked up by our retinas. It also has .gifs worth checking out, that basically use colors burned into your eyes and transposes them onto other colors. That allows our brains to see two different colors on top of each other (not blended), and access these impossible colors.

The obvious issue this brings up is how to see these colors without those tricky .gifs? So far, there’s no answer for that. Down the road, sure, some scientists may invent a way to implant cones with less overlap, but as of now all we have are tricks we can play on the eye. Regardless, accessing these extra colors isn’t an immediate concern for science, but it will be interesting to see if one day in the distant future humans see far more colors in nature.

Seeing things that I perceived as fact be debunked is one of my favorite things. We all know the five senses, sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste, and it’s hard to think of other senses that we have. Unless you ask the Harvard Medical School, of course.

They list six extra senses, each with super long, scientific names. The most obvious extra senses we have are, in laymen’s terms, balance, pain (Harvard said it’s different than the sense of touch because it’s in the brain. I trust them), and sense of temperature (also different from touch). The other three are a little more complicated. First is “proprioception”, but what it basically is is your body’s awareness of itself in relation to itself. The example they gave is this: close your eyes and touch a finger to your nose. Proprioception was the sense you used to do that. Another sense is the sense of time. Being able to estimate how long you’ve been at a party is a sense you don’t learn in elementary school. The final sense is interoception, which I interpreted as more or less the same thing as homeostasis, in the sense (pun intended) that it’s involuntary and internal. Interoception tells your lungs they need to take in air, and it tells your heart it needs to pump.

Of course, as with all science, there’s no definitive answer to how many senses we have. Scientists know that other senses exist that humans don’t have, for example birds migrating by feeling magnetic fields, or Venus flytraps sensing nearby vibrations or tones.

Another question worth asking is, what senses will we have? Maybe down the road, humans will develop the senses of smell and hearing that dogs have. Also, when we have a better understanding of either technology or the brain, can we artificially give people more senses? If someone wears a certain kind of bracelet, could they use echolocation? For now, we’ll have to settle for our eleven known senses.

Hey class, my name is Doug Leeson. I am from Bethlehem, PA, and I am a Journalism major. I took this course because I have never really been able to make myself care about chemistry or biology, because the concepts just seem so distant and irrelevant to me. The reason I am not a science major is because I never had an interest in science as a whole. I am enrolled in the College of Communications because they and their majors offer much more personal interaction, which is where my interests lie. Anyway, here’s a picture of my friend that always makes me laugh.