August 26, 2010
Green Man: In Photos
Check out our flickr site for all the pics from this weekend at Green Man, including Jelly Brain Dissections with Guy Billings
the Flavour Feast
August 25, 2010
Green Man: Jelly Brains
In a lovely pop up presentation with a quivering jelly brain (plus a dozen miniature pannacotta brains), neuroscientist Guy Billings took us through the anatomy of our marvelous cerebrums.
It truly is an amazing construction – and we certainly do not use “10 per cent” of it, as popular myths would have us believe.
Rather, we use the entire thing – as a number of unfortunate individuals have discovered. At the mercy of curious mid 20th-century neuroscientists, famous individuals such as HM had small chunks of their cortex removed in misguided attempts to cure severe depression, epilepsy and other crippling conditions.
As we discovered, those little bits were quite necessary. HM was left with no short term memory – as Guy put it, “a human goldfish”, unable to remember anything for longer than a few seconds.
Thankfully the rest of us in the garden in Wales had ours intact, and could enjoy carving up a pannacotta model in lieu of the real thing to learn about the structure of the most complex object in the known universe. Safer, and tastier, than the real thing.
Green Man: Free Bass
Excuse me, Sir. Would you like some free bass?
Have you ever held a balloon inside a nightclub or rave, and discovered that it resonates delightfully with the music? The sac of air acts like a natural amplifier for sound waves, and low wave frequencies in particular. Most pleasing.
Green Man: Liars’ Picnic
“I don’t believe your favourite film’s Inception – that is definitely a lie!”
Accusations and deceit were on the cards at our Liars’ Picnic in the Green Man yurt tent last weekend. Lynsey Gozna and Rachel Taylor, both psychologists who study deception, joined us to speak about what the latest research can tell us about lying: why people do it, the strategies they use, and how best to spot it…
To test the audience’s deception skills, I worked with Lynsey and Rachel to devise a number of games that would reward successful fibbers and the best lie detectors.
First of all we asked volunteers to read out 4 statements that included two truths and two lies. The audience had to pick fib from fact, and the volunteer who conned the audience most effectively won themselves a bottle of Guerilla Science patented ‘truth serum’ (it really works, honest).
Next up, contestants had to pick between two picnic hampers, one containing a prize, the other containing a tome penned by an infamous liar. Standing in their way were two gatekeepers, one truthful and one deceiver.
Then, for the grand finale, we challenged the audience to test themselves against a lie detector that delivers a mild electric shock if it thinks your lying! It only hurt a bit…
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