Brain Trust (15 page)

But max speed is only one of three factors that make the perfect punch. Imagine the superfast flick of your finger—it’s annoying behind the ear, but it’s unlikely to cause real damage. “What you want is maximum pressure,” says Walker. This is high momentum applied over a small surface area, and it’s why many martial arts teach striking with the side of the hand or the four pointy knuckles of your bent fingers—decreased surface area is like whacking a person with a stiletto heel instead of the sole of a sneaker. Ideally you’d punch with the fingertip of death, but unless you’ve trained for decades at a Shaolin temple, your one pointed finger is likely to crumple between your opponent’s sternum and your onrushing arm.

In addition to speed and outside of adjusting your fist size, the best factor to focus on when throwing a punch is the third piece of pressure—mass. One reason a punch from a heavyweight does more damage than a flyweight’s punch of the same speed is simple arm weight. A big wrecking ball does more damage than a little wrecking ball. “But an effective punch uses more than just
the fist,” says Walker. You’ve heard the phrase “Put your body behind it” and in punching that’s exactly right.

“Rocky Marciano was an extremely effective fighter, partly because he was short,” says Walker. Being shorter than his opponents allowed Marciano to punch upward, using his legs to add to the force of the punch—rather than bracing his punch against his weight alone. Speaking of bracing a punch against your weight, the wider your stance, the more horizontal force you can create. Likewise with a forward lean of your body—it’s all about bracing your punch against the floor. For this reason, “what you see a lot of in movie martial arts—jumping up into the air—costs a lot of force,” says Walker. By jumping you might gain the force that gravity exerts on your dropping body, but you lose the much greater force you could generate by pushing against the floor.

In fact, if you want to see the perfect punch in action, watch videos of Olympic shot-putters: a low crouch, a forward-leaning upper body, and a rotating torso, all with the aim of creating max force through one extended hand. A one-punch knockout comes from the legs.

Another punch researcher, psychologist John
Pierce, at Philadelphia University, used sensors embedded in the gloves of professional boxers to measure punch force during matches. What he found is that while a one-punch knockout is certainly possible, much more common is knockout by accumulated force. “Once neck muscles fatigue, they can’t absorb as much force, and so while later punches aren’t necessarily thrown any harder, their force on the victim is much increased,” says Pierce. He calls this point of neck muscle fatigue “the tipping point.”

Robert Provine played baritone sax with the Delbert McClinton band. He’s also a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland–Baltimore County and wrote the book
Laughter: A Scientific Investigation
. From one to the other isn’t the leap you might expect. “Good jazz and laughter are both products of listening to and responding to social signals,” says Provine.

For example, take the opening of my recorded call with Provine—why do I laugh after saying, “Do you mind if I click record? Because I’m thinking about podcasting quotes later … ha, ha, ha!” It’s because I’m trying to signal that I’m no threat—to assure him that I won’t stitch the quotes together into a Mel Gibson diatribe that I can then submit to celebrity gossip sites or otherwise use these recorded words against him.

Similarly, throughout the call, I chuckle to indicate understanding as in, “ha, ha, that’s right!” And I laugh to indicate uncertainty, as in “I wonder if anyone’s ever thought about that … ha, ha, ha?” Provine’s spent thousands of hours cataloging similar uses of laughter, from campus gathering places to high school cafeterias to mall food courts. His findings include the facts that speakers are about 46 percent more likely to laugh than listeners, laughter is thirty times more likely in social situations than when alone, laughter frequently takes the place of periods or commas, and only 10–15 percent of prelaugh comments are even remotely funny.

“Actually,” Provine says, “laughter is more about relationships than jokes.” Human laughter evolved from the grunts and snorts of playing apes, who use these vocalizations to signal social inclusion. Sure, you may overlay the trigger of a punch line or a wry aside or a pun or a surprising observation, but if you want to
bring the funny, you have to first become part of the pack. That’s why so many jokes start with “There I was, standing in line at the grocery store,” or “Don’t you just hate airplane seats?,” or other descriptions meant to create the bond of shared experience between joker and jokee.

“We don’t laugh at Jay Leno because he’s funny,” says Provine. “We laugh because we empathize with Jay Leno.”

So if you want to make people laugh, instead of practicing your punch lines, practice your empathy and listening skills.

Chris Ballinger of Magic Geek
(
www.magicgeek.com
) points out that just like humor, magic depends as much on connecting with people as it does on trick mechanics. “Even when you buy a trick that’s self-working, you need a story to make it magical,” says Ballinger. He counts as his best trick a simple sleight of hand in which sponge rabbits multiply, saying, “the audience can be part of the story of these rabbits both physically and emotionally.” Like humor, Ballinger says the crux of magic is “about being able to connect with the audience and fool them at the same time.”

At your local Baskin-Robbins you might order a waffle cone dipped in chocolate with sprinkles, but cones in your eyes come in only three set flavors: S, M, and L. Each flavor of photoreceptive cone fires in the presence of a certain wavelength of light, and while there’s some color crossover, effectively one recognizes red, another green, and another blue.
So your eye is like an RGB computer screen, with all the other colors of the rainbow a mixed twinkle of SLM cones firing in varying combinations.

That is, unless you’re color-blind. Common red-green color blindness is caused by defective genes on the × chromosome, which code for whacked green cones—the wavelength these cones recognize is squeezed toward red, leaving green undetected. And because these bad genes are on an × chromosome, dudes without a backup × are especially susceptible—red-green color blindness affects 6 percent of males.

Jay Neitz hopes to change that. Neitz is an experimental ophthalmologist and head of the Color Vision Lab at the University of Washington, and he injected viruses into the eyes of color-blind monkeys.

Here’s what a virus does: It attaches to a cell like a mosquito and injects genetic material. Commonly, viruses inject genes that appropriate the cell’s machinery to create more viruses, which eventually rupture forth like battle orcs to continue the great cycle of viral life. But Neitz engineered his viruses to inject another kind of genetic material—genes that use a cell’s machinery to make missing color pigments. (This, in a nutshell, is gene therapy. It’s like downloading a software update.)

And—voilà!—these monkeys, once color-blind, now could see! One can only imagine their increased skill at discovering which guavas are ripe, and at driving amid traffic signals. Human application is in the pipes.

But why stop at bringing a deficit up to normal? (See this book’s entry with Hugh Herr.) Why not keep a foot on the accelerator and blow right past the puny abilities evolution hath wrought?

“It’s not a question of could,” says Neitz. “It’s a question of should.” For example, he says, what about putting a light detector in your fingertip? Or creating a brain-linked array that would
sense radiation or allow you to see heat? “It’s hard to know what energies are out there we’re not exploiting,” says Neitz.

But even within the realm of existing senses, there’s room for some good-natured, unholy augmentative technology reminiscent of creating a human-snake-meerkat chimera. For example, “What would a fourth type of photoreceptor be?” wonders Neitz.

Again, humans lacking the pigment needed to see green might mislabel yellow as orange or call a dark green car black. But what if we’re all incapable of distinguishing, say, purple-quack from purple-not-quack, due to lack of a gene that codes for the quack pigment? What if instead of RGB we could see in RGBQ?

Personally, I’ll take
Predator
vision, but seeing an inhuman color would be pretty awesome too.

While at the University of Wisconsin, Neitz
consulted on a project that asked WDDS? After answering the question What do deer see?, it was a short step to creating more effective camouflage for human hunters. Interestingly, evolutionary biologists propose that the common red-green color blindness may actually help humans see through some types of jungle leaf patterns, making this color blindness an evolutionary advantage, especially for male hunters.

Speaking of supersight, neurobiologist Mark
Changizi, formerly of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and now director of human cognition at 2AI Labs, has telepathy and X-ray vision. In fact, you do too. “We have an extra cone in our eyes that dogs don’t have,” says Changizi, and this cone is specifically calibrated to sense the minute color changes in skin due to hemoglobin oxygenation. “Human vision has not evolved to find ripe fruit in the forest,” says Changizi, “but to sense emotions in others.”

And about X-ray vision: “For a hundred years, they thought forward-facing eyes had something to do with stereovision,” says Changizi, maybe allowing you better depth perception for jumping from branch to branch, grabbing fruit, and later chucking spears at passing mammoths and hitting balls of twine-wrapped cork. But there’s a fairly glaring problem with that theory: Most animals that jump and catch have sideways-facing eyes. Instead, Changizi thinks forward-facing eyes are born of the forest. “Hold your finger in front of your eyes and you can see right through it,” he says, pointing out that large forest animals with forward-facing eyes are equipped to see 6.5 times more stuff than forest animals with sideways eyes.

“The average American consumes two hundred calories of sugar-sweetened beverages every day,” says Brenda Davy, health and nutrition researcher at Virginia Tech. Using the widely accepted (translation: debatable and vastly oversimplified) conversion of thirty-five hundred calories per pound of fat, this means that if you changed Pepsi into water, all else equal you would lose almost two pounds a month.

But Pepsi isn’t the only thing you can replace with water. Water replaces food, too. And you don’t even have to own enough willpower to consciously reach for a glass instead of a bite. Dr. Davy showed this by prescribing two cups of water before a meal. In the course of a twelve-week study, subjects who drank water before a low-calorie meal lost an average of five pounds more than subjects who simply ate the low-calorie meal.

In a yearlong follow-up to this study, Davy found that even with the removal of the low-calorie diet, people who drank water before meals were able to keep the weight off while people who went back to their lives as usual tended to gain some, most, or all of the weight back.