The Ig Nobel Prizes are being announced today (Sept 12). Here’s a look at some of the past winners and their achievements that have made people laugh, and think about
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They are called the Igs, short for Ig Nobel Prizes. And they are given away for achievements that are ‘so surprising that they make people laugh, then think’, says the website. Remember the order- laugh, then think. I did a lot of the first when reading the achievements of the winners… and every time I paused to think, I ended up laughing a lot more.
The latest edition of the Igs took place on September 12 at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, none less. For the record, Nobel laureates are the ones who give away the prizes to their Ig Nobel brethren.
The ceremony, to quote its website, is ‘a gala mix of awards ceremony, circus, opera, and many other things’. But then it ought to be. How else would one honour Christine Pham, Bobak Hedayati, et al, who won the 2023 Ig Nobel for Medicine for examining cadavers to find out whether there is an equal number of hairs in a person’s two nostrils.
Or Katy Tam, Cyanea Poon, et al, for methodically studying the boredom of teachers and students. Their paper has an exciting title: Whatever Will Bore, Will Bore: The Mere Anticipation of Boredom Exacerbates its Occurrence in Lectures.
To those of you who roll your eyes upward when reading this, the Psychology prize was won by a group of researchers who conducted experiments on a city street to see how many passersby stop to look upward when they see strangers looking upward.
I’d love to pat the backs of the winners of the 2022 Literature Prize because the subject they analysed is something I have often wanted to explore: an analysis of what makes legal documents unnecessarily difficult to understand. The title of their paper offers an inkling to the reason legal documents are often gobbledygook to lay readers: Poor Writing, Not Specialized Concepts, Drives Processing Difficulty in Legal Language.
Some of the subjects past winners have studied are truly interesting:
The 2003 Ig Nobel for Medicine was won by a few individuals from University College London for presenting evidence that the brains of London taxi drivers are more highly developed than those of their fellow citizens.
The same year a gentleman won the Literature prize for meticulously collecting data and publishing more than 80 detailed academic reports about things that annoyed him, such as: What percentage of young people wear baseball caps with the peak facing the rear rather than the front; What percentage of pedestrians wear sport shoes that are white rather than some other color; and what percentage of shoppers exceed the number of items permitted in a supermarket’s express checkout lane. Now that last one is something I know a lot of people would want to know.
Then there was Jacques Benveniste, who took the prize in Chemistry for his discovery that water is an intelligent liquid, and for demonstrating (to his satisfaction) that water can remember events long after all traces of those events have vanished.
But I guess few can beat the achievement of Lal Bihari, of Uttar Pradesh, India. This gentleman, according to the Ig Nobel team, won the Peace prize for a triple accomplishment: First, for leading an active life even though he has been declared legally dead; second, for waging a lively posthumous campaign against bureaucratic inertia and greedy relatives; and third, for creating the Association of Dead People.
Lal Bihari, say the organisers, overcame the handicap of being dead, and managed to obtain a passport from the Indian government so that he could travel to Harvard to accept his Prize. However, the U.S. government refused a visa to him so his friend Madhu Kapoor accepted it on his behalf.
Now that’s proof that you can be legally dead and still win a prize that is not posthumous.
Go ahead, laugh, and then think.
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