Anyone who has learned to touch type has probably wondered about the peculiar arrangement of the standard keyboard, usually called QWERTY. Why aren’t the letters in, say, alphabetical order?

The fact is, some of the earliest typewriters did have keyboards in alphabetical order. But they had a problem: alphabetical order put some frequently used letter pairs too close together on the keyboard, resulting in mechanical clashes.

QWERTY was invented in 1868 and adopted by Remington for the Sholes and Glidden Type-Writer, whose brand name eventually became the generic name of all such machines—one sure sign of a commercial success.

The other sign of the machine’s success is the fact that its QWERTY layout was soon adopted by all other manufacturers.

QWERTY was designed to prevent the mechanical clashes that arose in early machines when two adjacent keys were struck in quick succession. It did that by separating frequently used letter pairs to opposite sides of the keyboard. (It also, not coincidentally, contains all the letters for the word “typewriter” in the top row, allowing salesmen to easily demonstrate the machine.)

QWERTY is now everywhere, which means that most of what you read passed, at some time, through a QWERTY keyboard. And now there’s research that suggests that the QWERTY arrangement actually affects the emotional content of what we read.

Linguists and psychologists talk about the “articulators” used in language production. They usually mean part of the vocal tract, but with so much language being produced using a keyboard, increasingly we’re letting our fingers do our articulation for us.

In spoken language, a portion of the meaning of words is linked to the way they are articulated. Researchers Kyle Jasmin and Daniel Casasanto wanted to find out if the same held true for typed language.

How does this supposed effect work? The QWERTY keyboard is asymmetrical: there are actually more letters on the left side of the midline than on the right. This means it is slightly more difficult to type words that use left-side letters than those that use right-side letters (something which has been demonstrated experimentally).

The researchers decided to test the hypothesis that “right-side words,” because they are easier to type, might be viewed more positively than left-side word. Not only that, but this might carry over to spoken language, because touch-typists (like me) actually implicitly activate the positions of keys when they read words.

To test this, Jasmin and Casasanto conducted three experiments, using three QWERTY-using languages (Dutch, Spanish, and, of course, English.) In the first, they set out to find out if the QWERTY effect carried across different languages—and found that it did. They showed participants a list of words and had them rate the emotional “valence” on a scale of one to five (using “manikins,” a smiling figure at the positive end and a frowning figure at the negative end).  Overall, words with more right-side letters were rated to have a more positive meaning than words with more left-side letters.

Next, they tested whether QWERTY influences new words more than old words…and found that the QWERTY effect was indeed more apparent in words coined after the invention of QWERTY.

Finally, they tested for the effect with pseudowords, made-up words with no meaning. (Science fiction and fantasy writers take note! We make up words all the time.) Sure enough, made-up words with more right-side letters were judged to have more positive meanings.

In the words of the researchers, “It appears that using QWERTY shapes the meaning of existing words and may also influence which new words and abbreviations get adopted into the lexicon and the ‘texticon’ by encouraging the use of words and abbreviations whose emotional valences are congruent with the letters’ locations on the keyboard.”

And the practical applications?

“People responsible for naming new products, brands and companies might do well to consider the potential advantages of consulting their keyboards and choosing the ‘right’ name.”

And for what’s it worth, I just realized that my name, Edward, is typed entirely using the left-hand keys.

It’s a wonder I have any friends at all.

The key to keeping a resolution is willpower, obviously. But what is willpower? Is it some mysterious quality that some people have and others don’t? Is it a virtue we can build in ourselves with practice? Is it what separates saints from sinners?

None of the above, say some scientists. According to Roy F. Baumeister, a social psychologist at the University of Florida, willpower is simply a form of mental energy, fueled, like all brain functions, by glucose in the bloodstream. And that means that like any other form of mental energy, it can be used up.

Baumeister, in a 2007 experiment, gave students an attention-taxing task (watching a boring video while ignoring words at the bottom of the screen), then rewarded them with a glass of lemonade. Half got lemonade made with real sugar, while the others got lemonade sweetened with Splenda. They were then given tests of self-control—and the students who had drunk Splenda-sweetened lemonade consistently performed worse. Their willpower was literally unfueled.

Baumeister has co-written a book on the subject, Willpower, with John Tierney, science columnist for the New York Times. He calls this state of mental fatigue “ego depletion,” and there’s really nothing we can do about it: it’s just the way our brains work. So the real key to keeping resolutions, Baumeister and others believe, is, as Jonah Lehrer put it in a recent article for Wired.com, “to recognize the inherent weakness of the will.”

Nothing displays that weakness better than New Year’s resolutions. A 2002 study by John C. Norcross and other psychologists at the University of Scranton found that by the end of January 26 percent of resolvers had broken their resolutions. Half had broken them by March. By July, that had risen to 56 percent. A 2007 survey found that eventually 88 percent of all resolutions end in failure.

Bad statistics perhaps, but there’s actually a flip side. Sure, only 44 percent of those who made resolutions continued to cling to them by July, but only four percent of a control group who had the same goals (i.e., losing weight) had made progress in that same amount of time. Resolutions, in other words, made it ten times more likely people would actually change what they wanted to change.

And despite the odds, some people do succeed at sticking to efforts at self-improvement. How do they do it?

A new study says it’s not by any great feat of willpower, of which they have no more than anyone else. Rather, it’s by application of careful strategy.

In this study, led by Wilhelm Hoffmann at the University of Chicago, 205 participants in Wurtzburg, Germany, received specially designed smartphones. Over a week, they were pinged seven times a day and asked to report whether they were experiencing a strong desire: if so, they were then asked to describe it, how strongly they felt it, and whether it caused an “internal conflict.” If it did cause a conflict, they were asked about their ensuing success at controlling it: did they successfully thwart their desire to, say, eat a whole container of ice cream?

About half the desires were reported as causing internal conflict. In about 40 percent of those cases, the subject attempted to actively resist the desire. Resistance was not futile: only 17 percent of those desires that were resisted were acted upon, whereas 70 percent of desires that were not resisted were consummated.

The key finding, though, was that the best way to thwart self-conflicting desires isn’t through the application of weak willpower, but by avoiding temptation in the first place. As Lehrer puts it, “unsuccessful dieters try not to eat the ice cream in their freezer, thus quickly exhausting their limited willpower resources,” whereas “those high in self-control refuse to even walk down the ice cream aisle in the supermarket.”

The latest scientific findings, to be sure: but what it all boils down to for me is an old saying I heard many times growing up: “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

If you don’t want to yield to temptation, better to avoid it altogether: and maybe, just maybe, you’ll actually keep your New Year’s resolution.

(The photo: A dessert table at the International Festival of Wine & Food, Banff Springs Hotel.)

Aside from those keeners who have set up combination desks/treadmills (Arthur Slade, I’m looking at you), a poor choice for those of us who cannot walk and chew gum at the same time, much less walk and type at the same time, most writers do little but sit on their rear ends and tap on a keyboard.

It was therefore with great interest that I read a press release describing a study just published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, which indicates that one key to losing weight might be, not physical exercise, but a writing exercise.

The study was conducted by Christine Logel of Renison University College at the University of Waterloo and Geoffrey L. Cohen of Stanford University.

The researchers recruited 45 female undergraduates who had a body mass index of 23 or higher. A BMI within the range of 18.5 to 24.9 is considered normal weight; a little more than half of the women (58 percent) fell outside that range and thus would be considered overweight or obese.

Each woman was weighed, and then provided with a list of important values: i.e., creativity, politics, music, and relationships with friends and family members. Each woman was asked to rank the values in the order of how important they were to her.

With that established, half the women were told to write for 15 minutes about whichever value they had ranked most important, while the other half (the control group) were told to write about why a value they personally ranked low might be valuable to someone else.

Between one and four months later, the women came back to be weighed again, and, rather astoundingly, the women who had written about an important value had lost an average of 3.41 pounds, while the women in the control group had (as is typical of undergraduates at university) gained an average of 2.75 pounds.

Why? Well, Logel’s theory is that the women who wrote about values that were important to them felt better about themselves, and that led to better habits: perhaps writing about an important value made a particular woman feel so good that she went home and, for once, didn’t snack; and that, in turn, helped derail a snacking habit that had been contributing to her weight gain.

The results tie in with previous studies that have found that thinking about values, even briefly, can have a big effect. For example, Cohen has used the same technique with minority seventh-graders who were underperforming relative to their white peers. The results: those who did the exercise continued to perform better for years thereafter.

“We have this need to feel self-integrity,” Logel is quoted as saying. “We can buffer that self-integrity by reminding ourselves how much we love our children, for example.”

So does that mean the key to losing weight is as simple as writing about something you value, once, for just 15 minutes?

Naturally, the researchers urge caution, and say it’s too soon to tell. They point out that the women in the study didn’t know that writing about values was supposed to help them live healthier, although they may have twigged, since most psychological studies don’t require a weigh-in.

Logel herself, however, is a firm believer in the benefit of focusing on things of value. She carries a keychain that reminds her of one of her own important values (although the press release doesn’t say exactly what it is, personally, not forgetting my keys is something I value).

And, Logel says, the ultimate goal of all her research along these lines is to find out what people can do to deliberately benefit from this fascinating effect.

In the meantime, she says, “There’s certainly no harm in taking time to reflect on important values and working activities you value in your daily life.”

Personally, I just like the idea of a writing exercise to help you lose weight.

It sure beats that other kind of exercise…although somehow I suspect the panting-and-sweating kind would still be a good idea, too.

Alcohol is a very odd thing for us to imbibe, when you come right down to it. It is, after all, the waste product of another life-form: namely, yeast. There are very few other life forms whose waste products we willingly take into our body. So why do we do it?

The answer, of course, is that this particular waste product produces interesting side-effects when ingested: side-effects that humans discovered very, very early on (beer and wine-making were already well-established in the Middle East by 1500 B.C.).

Although alcohol, like barbiturates, tranquilizers and anesthetics, is a depressant (in that it depresses the central nervous system, not in that it makes you depressed, although, of course, it may), at low doses it actually acts as a mild stimulant, producing exhilaration, loss of restraints and inhibitions and talkativeness—which is what makes it popular at parties.

At higher doses you begin to see things like slurred speech, sensory disturbance, poor balance and impaired judgment, and as the blood-alcohol concentration continues to increase, you eventually reach fun things like unconsciousness, coma, and, ultimately, death. Which are not so popular at parties.

Alcohol is easily absorbed into the bloodstream through the walls of the small intestine. How quickly it is absorbed determines how quickly its effects are felt. (Drinking while eating is less intoxicating than drinking on an empty stomach, because the fat and protein in the foods in the stomach delay alcohol absorption.)

Alcohol is metabolized by the liver, at a rate of about 3/4 to one drink per hour. Drink more rapidly than that, and your blood alcohol concentration rises. Unfairly (but nothing says physiology has to be fair), if a man and a woman drink the same amount, the woman will usually become more intoxicated. Men have more of an enzyme called dehydrogenase that breaks down alcohol, and also tend to have more body water than women, which means the alcohol is more diluted than in women. Also, men tend to be larger.

As I noted earlier, every year new alcohol-related stories emerge just in time for the festive season. It’s almost as if writers expect people to imbibe more at this time of year than others. Go figure.

This year’s most interesting example: a press release about new research indicating that alcohol tastes sweeter when loud music is playing.

At the University of Portsmouth in the U.K., psychologist Lorenzo Stafford asked 80 participants (69 females and 11 males, all regular drinkers, aged between 18 and 28) to rate a selection of drinks on the basis of strength, sweetness and bitterness. While they were doing so, they were subjected to four different levels of distraction, from none all the way up to loud club-style music playing at the same time as someone was reading a news report.

The participants rated drinks significantly sweeter overall when they were listening to music alone: which is interesting, because it indicates it’s not the level of distraction but music specifically that makes alcohol taste sweeter. Since we tend to drink more of things that are sweet than things that are bitter, this could explain why, as previous research has shown, we tend to drink more and faster when loud music is playing.

Ah, you may say, but even if I drink a little too much, I always walk home rather than drive, so I’m all right, right?

Not so fast. Also appearing just in time for the holidays: an article detailing the dangers of walking under the influence. According to the journal Injury Prevention, from 1986 to 2002, 410 pedestrians in the U.S. were killed on New Year’s Day. Of those, 58 percent had high blood-alcohol concentrations. In 2008, says the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, 38 percent of fatally injured pedestrians 16 and older had blood-alcohol concentrations at or above 0.08 percent. Never mind people who fall down the stairs or trip at home.

So this New Year’s Eve, remember this sage advice: even though you’re imbibing another life form’s waste product, you don’t have to get wasted.

(The photo: Beer in winter. Big Rock Traditional, for those who really, really need to know.)

I also like to think I’m an honest guy. Tell the truth, keep your word, don’t cheat: that’s how I was brought up, and I do my best to live up to my upbringing.

According to a new study, though, that may make me a mite unusual. Research just published by the American Psychological Association (APA)  indicates that creative people are more likely to cheat than less creative people.

The research, conducted by Francesca Gino of Harvard University and Dan Ariely of Duke University, appeared online in the APA’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology under the title, “The Dark Side of Creativity: Original Thinkers Can Be More Dishonest.”

Gino and Ariely first used a series of established psychological tests to measure their subjects’ creativity, and also tested their subjects’ intelligence. Then they carried out a series of five experiments.

In each, the participants received a small sum of money just for showing up. Then they were presented with various tasks and tests, each of which was designed so that they could be paid more if they cheated.

For example: they took a general knowledge quiz, circling their answers on the test paper (and were told they would be paid more for correct answers) Afterward the experimenter told them to transfer their answers to “bubble sheets”, but also told them that she had photocopied the wrong sheet and that as a result the correct answers were already lightly marked on the sheets.

So: the participants had incentive to cheat (more money for correct answers) and the impression they could cheat without detection when transferring their answers (in reality, all of the papers had unique identifiers so the experimenter would be able to tell if they’d cheated).

The results? Those whose tests indicated they were the most creative were also significantly more likely to cheat. (On the other hand, there was no link between intelligence and dishonesty, so those who were more intelligent but less creative were no more likely to cheat than those who lacked both intelligence and creativity.)

In another experiment, the subjects were shown drawings with dots on both sides of a diagonal line, and were asked to indicate whether there were more dots on the left or the right side. In half of the 200 trials, it was virtually impossible to tell: but participants had been told they’d be paid 10 times as much (five cents, rather than half a cent) each time they said there were more dots on the right side…and, sure enough, creative participants were significantly more likely to give the answer that paid more.

So why should creative people be more likely to cheat? The researchers believe it’s because creativity makes it easier for people to rationalize their actions. Or as Francesca Gino put it in the APA’s press release summing up the results, “Greater creativity helps individuals solve difficult tasks across many domains, but creative sparks may lead individuals to take unethical routes when searching for solutions to problems and tasks.”

In the paper itself, the researchers concluded that “the results from the current article indicate that, in fact, people who are creative or work in environments that promote critical thinking may be the most at risk when they face ethical dilemmas.”

Now, as I should probably point out more often than I do, it’s dangerous to draw too many conclusions from a single study. The authors themselves note that the most obvious limitation to their work is the fact that they created situations in which people were tempted by money to cheat.

They suggest further researcher into whether creativity leads people to satisfy selfish, short-term goals rather than their higher aspirations when faced with what they call “self-control dilemmas”—such as eating a slice of cake when trying to lose weight.

In other words (my other words, not theirs), if you’re creative enough, maybe you can justify anything—even things that ordinary, less-creative people would take one look at and say, “that’s just plain wrong.”

“Thinking outside the box” can lead to great discoveries and amazing advancements…but sometimes, thinking outside the box can land you in trouble.

Or potentially, if you’re particularly creative, in jail: and all the thinking in the world won’t get you out of that box.

(The photo: Nothing to do with anything, really, but it’s kind of creative.)

But gags like that are funny because they have a grain of truth in them, and increasingly, I’m finding that grain of truth sticking in my own aging gullet.

Of course, when an oyster finds an irritant in its gullet, it turns that oyster into a pearl. My equivalent is turning it into a science column. (Albeit obviously not one focusing on the biology of the oysters, since even if they have gullets, I’m pretty sure that’s not where they make pearls.)

As it turns out, this science column is even more like a pearl than I thought. After all, pearls reduce an oyster’s irritation. And I find myself far less irritated by my lapses of memory now that I’ve learned it may not have all that much to do with age. Rather, it appears the blame lies with doorways.

No, that’s not a non sequitur and even further evidence of the decay of my mental processes. Research just published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology really does indicate all of us, regardless of age, are more likely to forget things when we pass through a doorway.

The research, conducted by Gabriel Radvansky, a psychology professor  at Notre Dame University, refines some of his previous research which already indicated that  moving from room to room can make us forgetful.

In the new study, Radvansky conducted three experiments. In the first, participants used a virtual  environment like you’d find in a computer game. They selected an object from a table in one virtual room–say, a blue wedge–and either walked across the room to another table, set down the object, and picked up a different object, or walked into another room (through a doorway), set down the object, and picked up a different object. Along the way, they were “probed” with the name of an object, asked if it was either the object they were carrying or the one they had put down (they couldn’t see the object they were carrying or the one they had set down). Those who passed through doorways were more likely to have forgotten what they were either carrying or had just set down than those who had merely crossed the room.

In his previous experiments along these lines, the experience was made as immersive as possible, using a 66-inch diagonal screen the participants sat very close to. The new experiment used only 17-inch monitors, to see if what Radvansky calls the “location-updating effect” depends on how immersive the experience is. Apparently, it does not.

In the second experiment, Radvansky for the first time tested the effect in the real world, to see if it was just an artifact of a sensory-impoverished virtual world. To make sure participants couldn’t see what they were carrying or had set down, the objects were concealed in black boxes. Sure enough, walking through a doorway increased forgetfulness.

In the third experiment, once more in the virtual environment, participants passed through several rooms but ended up in the same room they had started in, to see if the ability to remember is linked to the environment in which a decision is made. The experiment showed no improvements in memory upon returning to the original room.

All of this supports the “event horizon model of event cognition and memory” that Radvansky and his colleagues have been developing. The theory holds that our brains segment events into a series of “event models” that are processed one at a time. Passing through a doorway *an “event boundary”) triggers the formation of a new event model: and information in the current event model takes precedence over the previous event model. When the brain needs to retrieve information for two event models at once, as when it is called upon to remember an object it incorporated into a previous event model but cannot now see, that “competitive retrieval” leads to “retrieval interference”–i.e., forgetfulness.

Frankly, I find not only reassuring, but inspiring. So inspiring, I think I’ll write a sequel to Nancy Ford and Gretchen Cryer’s off-Broadway musical I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking it on the Road.

I’ll call it I Finally Got My Act Together But I Forgot Where I Left It.

(Sorry, no photo: I forgot.)

Well, at least it’s not $1,000!

We’re used to seeing these kinds of pricing games. You almost never see a product priced at an even, say, $23; no, it will be $22.99 or $22.98.  I’ve put a couple of my old young adult science fiction books on Kindle. You can currently buy Andy Nebula: Interstellar Rock Star and its sequel, Andy Nebula: Double Trouble, for just $0.99. Why not $1.00? Well…because everyone knows that pricing something just under the next round number somehow magically convinces people that they’re getting a bargain.

There’s just one problem. According to Robert Schindler, a professor of marketing at the Rutgers School of Business-Camden, who has been studying this marketing strategy for years, it doesn’t always work.

In fact, sometimes it can backfire: “When consumers care more about product quality than price,” he says, “just-below pricing” (as this technique is called) “has been found to actually hurt retail sales.”

Schindler conducted a meta-analysis of more than 100 different studies of just-below pricing and says that, yes, it does work: people really do perceive, subconsciously, a big difference in price between $19.99 and $20, and think they’re getting a bargain. The effect is actually greater than the perceived difference between something priced at $25 and $20, even though $5 is rationally a much greater savings than one cent.

The reason seems to be that people pay a disproportionate amount of attention to the leftmost digit in prices: that’s the one that determines whether an object is seen as affordable.

A study published in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2009 bore this out. Kenneth C. Manning of Colorado State University and David E. Sprott of Washington State University conducted a number of experiments to see how people determined affordability. In one, they asked participants to consider two pens, one priced at $2 and the other at $4. Decreasing either price by a single cent lowered the leftmost digit by one.

They found that when the pens were priced at $2 and $3.99, respectively, 44 percent of the participants chose the higher-priced pen. But when the pens were priced at $1.99 and $4, only 18 percent  chose the higher-priced pen.

“The larger perceived price difference between the pens when they were priced at $1.99 and $4.00 led people to focus on how much they were spending and ultimately resulted in a strong tendency to select the cheaper alternative,” the researchers wrote.

In another experiment, the researchers compared two round prices (such as $30.00 and $40.00) to two just-below prices ($29.99 and $39.99).  They predicted that people would perceive the two round prices as more similar to each other than the two just-below prices, and that as a result, people would focus less on how much they were spending with the round prices…which proved to be the case: with round prices, a relatively large percentage of people chose the high-priced option, a percentage that dropped dramatically when they were presented with the just-below prices.

But Schindler, who has just completed a textbook on pricing strategies, says his meta-analysis of studies in the field shows that just-below pricing can have an unexpected downside: it can give the impression that an item is of poor or questionable quality, and thus should be avoided on luxury items and services or purchases that might be seen as risky.

The example he gives is of a contractor trying to get hired to work on someone’s house: the last thing you want is for your price to suggest that you might do a poor job, so it’s best to stay away from just-below pricing: keep your bid at, say, an even $10,000—don’t knock it down to $9,999.99.

Most of us spend more time shopping than pricing our own goods and services, though, and for shoppers, it’s definitely a case of caveat emptor. As Manning and Sprott put it, “Consumers should be aware of the subconscious tendency to focus on the leftmost digits of prices and how this tendency might bias their decision making.”

In short, a pig in a poke is still a pig in a poke–whether it’s priced at $100 or $99.99.

(The photo: The Dealers’ Room at the World Science Fiction Convention in Reno, Nevada, August, 2011.)

We’d like to think that, but we’d be wrong, as any number of studies have shown over the years.

Case in point: new research conducted at the University of Michigan that found that the speed at which someone talks, the number of pauses they use, and, to a certain extent, even the pitch of his or her voice, influence how willing we are to do what they say.

The study, presented May 14 at the annual meeting of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, specifically measured how these various speech characteristics influenced people’s decisions to participate in telephone surveys, but it’s quite likely the findings hold true in many other situations as well, from conversations with our bosses to conversations with our spouses.

Jose Benki, a research investigator at the university’s Institute for Social Research, and colleagues began their study by analyzing 1,380 introductory calls made by 100 male and female telephone interviewers at the Institute. They correlated the interviewers’ speech rates, fluency and pitch with their success in convincing people to participate in a survey.

When it came to speech rates, they found that interviewers who talked moderately fast (about 3.5 words per second) were much more successful than interviewers who talked very fast or very slowly.

That makes sense: people who talk quickly can be seen as trying to “pull a fast one,” whereas people who talk too slowly can be seen as either not too bright…or just pedantic.

But the next finding was less intuitive. Going in, the researchers assumed that interviewers who sounded lively and animated, who used a lot of variation in the pitch of their voices, would be more successful. Instead, they found that variation in pitch only had a marginal impact.

“It could be that variation in pitch could be helpful for some interviewers but for others, too much pitch variation sounds artificial, like people are trying too hard,” Benki is quoted as saying in a university press release. “So it backfires and puts people off.”

As for pitch in general, the researchers did not find any clear-cut evidence that, when it came to female voices, altos did better than sopranos, or vice versa. They did find that higher-voice males had worse success than their deep-throated colleagues, which I, being of the bass rather than tenor persuasion, am pleased to hear (as is James Earl Jones).

The most interesting finding of all was that those who were perfectly fluent, without any pauses in their speech, were actually less successful at persuading people to take the survey than were those who paused four or five times a minute. The pauses might be silent, or “filled” (i.e., “um”).

The lowest success rates of all belonged to people who did not have those pauses in their spiels. “We think that’s because they sound too scripted,” said Benki. “People who pause too much are seen as disfluent. But it was interesting that even the most disfluent interviewers had higher success rates than those who were perfectly fluent.”

Benki and her colleagues plan to continue analyzing the speech of the most and least successful interviewers to see how the content of the conversations and the quality of their speech influenced their success (or lack of it).

So let’s recap. People who speak neither too fast nor too slow, men with lower voices and…finally…those who…pause…as they speak…are more likely to be…persuasive…than those…who have none of these…characteristics.

You know what this means, don’t you?

Science has finally discovered why James Tiberius Kirk was the greatest Starfleet captain of them all!

And with William Shatner having just been honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award Foundation, about time, too.

(The photo: My favorite Star Trek character of all time,  Ensign Alice, at the 2002 World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose.)

Psychohistory came to mind when I read a recent article by Robert Lee Holtz in the Wall Street Journal outlining the research being conducted using the vast amounts of data collected by mobile phones.

According to Holtz, scientists are finding that, using the data collected through these ubiquitous communications devices (now in use by, incredibly, almost three-quarters of the world’s population), they can make amazingly accurate predictions about human behavior.

They can pinpoint “influencers”( people who are most likely to make others change their minds), predict where people will be in the future, detect subtle symptoms of mental illness, forecast movements in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and even chart the spread of political ideas.

What makes this all possible, as Holtz points out, is that the locations of mobile phones are routinely tracked by phone companies (necessarily, since they must be connected to the nearest cell tower). As well, for billing purposes, the timing and duration of calls have to be logged, along with the user’s billing address.

Phones log calling data, messaging activity and online activities. Many are equipped with sensors to record movements, a compass, a gyroscope and an accelerometer. They can even take photos and videos.

A modern cellphone is, in other words, an enormously powerful data collection device. Holtz quotes Dr. Alex Pentland at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as saying that phones allow researchers to get a “god’s-eye view of human behavior.”

Dr. Pentland has spent most of the last two years tracking 60 families living in campus quarters. By combining data from their smartphones with additional reports the participants file, he has recorded their movements, relationships, moods, health, calling habits and spending.

This follows up on a previous study during the final three months of the 2008 presidential election that tracked face-to-face encounters among 78 students. That study revealed that a third of the students changed their political opinions, and those changes were related to their face-to-face contact with project participants with different views, rather than encounters with their friends or exposure to traditional campaign advertising.

The new work is providing even more information about what Pentland calls “the molecules of behavior.” He says that “just by watching where you spend time, I can say a lot about the music you like, the car you drive, your financial risk, your risk for diabetes. If you add financial data, you get an even greater insight.”

Other researchers are using amounts of cellphone data so vast that they see humans as “little particles that move in space and occasionally communicate with each other,” as physicist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi of Northeastern University in Boston puts it. He led an experiment which studied the travel routines of 100,000 European mobile-phone users, and found that people’s movements follow a mathematical pattern: with enough information about past movements, the scientists could forecast an individual’s future whereabouts with 93.6 percent accuracy.

The amount of data available to be crunched is incredible. Nathan Eagle, a research fellow at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, works with 200 mobile-phone companies in 80 countries. One of his research data sets encompasses half a billion people in Latin America, Africa and Europe. (Among his findings: slums can be a catalyst for a city’s economic vitality, serving as “economic springboards” as entrepreneurs seek a way out of them.)

Going forward, researchers hope to use information gathered from mobile phones to improve public health, urban planning and marketing…and to continue to explore the basic rules of how humans interact with each other.

Which, Holtz points out, brings us back to the issue of privacy.

“We have always thought of individuals as being unpredictable,” he quotes Johan Bollen, an expert in complex networks at Indiana University, as saying. “These regularities [in behavior] allow systems to learn much more about us as individuals than we would care for.”

Hari Seldon was unavailable for comment.

(The photo: Flooding at Wascana Country Club, Regina, Saskatchewan, Easter Sunday, 2011.)

Research has shown that when viewers who have been told to count the number of passes don’t know the person in the gorilla suit is going to appear, more than 40 percent fail to see him, even though he stops halfway across the room to briefly thump his chest.

This failure to see something unusual that’s right in front of our eyes is called “inattention blindness,” and new research has shed some light on who is most susceptible to it, and why.

The key, it appears, is the capacity of a person’s working memory, the memory we use to deal with whatever we’re doing at any given moment. If you’re solving a math problem, or working on a grocery list, you’re using working memory.

The question has been whether people with a high working memory capacity are less likely to see a distraction because they focus more intently on the task at hand, or more likely to see it because they are better able to shift their attention as needed.

New research indicates it’s the latter: those with greater working memory capacity are more likely to see the gorilla than those with less.

The research was conducted by University of Utah psychologist Janelle Seegmiller (the video was the work of psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, who wrote a book called, naturally, The Invisible Gorilla), along with fellow psychology faculty members Jason Watson and David Strayer. Strayer has led several studies on cell phone use and distracted driving.

To begin, 306 psychology students were tested with the gorilla video. About a third were promptly excluded because they already had some knowledge of it. That left 197, ages 18 to 35, whose test results were analyzed.

First, the psychologists measured the participants’ working memory capacity using an “operation span test” in which they were given a set of math problems, each of which was followed by a letter. (For example: “Is 8 divided by 4, then plus 3, equal to 4? A.”)

There were 75 of these equation-letter combinations in all, divided into sets of three to seven. Participants were asked to recall all the letters of each set. For instance, if a set of five equations ended with PGDAE, they’d get a full five points if they remembered the letters in that order. (Although there was a catch: to ensure they weren’t just memorizing the letter order, they also had to solve at least 80 percent of the equations correctly.)

In the next step the participants watched the gorilla video, which features two three-member teams, one wearing red shirts, one wearing black shirts, passing basketballs back and forth. Participants were asked to count bounce passes and aerial passes by the black team. At the end, they were asked how many passes of each kind they counted, and whether they noted anything unusual. To ensure they were actually counting passes, and so were focused on the task in hand, only participants who were 80 percent accurate in their pass count were included in the final analysis.

The overall results were very similar to those noted by Simons and Chabris: 58 percent of participants who were reasonably accurate in counting passes noticed the gorilla, but 42 percent did not. When that was correlated with the working memory capacity test, the researchers found that the gorilla was noticed by 67 percent of those with high working memory capacity, but only 36 percent of those with low working memory capacity.

To put it in other words, those with greater working memory capacity have more “attentional control”: they are better able to focus attention when and where needed, and on more than one thing at a time.

Outside the lab, attentional control is important any time we’re trying to deal with more than one task at once. The most obvious real-world example is driving. Those with a greater working memory capacity are less likely to run a just-turned red light because they’re distracted by conversation, for instance.

It’s an interesting finding, but don’t think just because you have a higher working memory capacity, you can safely drive and talk on your cellphone at the same time. Previous research by this same team has shown that only a very few people (2.5 percent) can do so without impairment.

This probably still isn’t the whole story. At least, the Utah researchers don’t think it is: they plan to continue their research to look at other possible explanations for why some people suffer more from inattention blindness than others, including brain processing speed and differences in personality types.

Personally, I’ve always thought I’m very good at multitasking. I was doing four other things while writing this column, and I’ll bet you no close you matter how look can’t tell, can you?

(The photo: Gorillas in wash tubs at the Calgary Zoo.)