Éclat for the smartest girl in the room
Today: why a sticker chart can make kids love drawing less, the puffer jacket that began with a near-freezing fishing trip, why the fridge is where bread goes stale fastest, vampire bats that share dinner with their friends and what makes a song stick in your head — plus a French phrase for exactly that, and the case of the bell that never rang.
The Big Idea · Psychology
The Marker Experiment: Why Rewards Can Make You Love Something Less
In the early 1970s, psychologists Mark Lepper, David Greene and Richard Nisbett found preschoolers who already loved drawing with felt-tip markers. They split the children into groups. One group was promised a “Good Player” certificate for drawing, another got the same certificate as a surprise, and a third got nothing. Weeks later, the markers were left out during free play, with no prizes on offer. The children who had been promised a reward spent clearly less time drawing than the others. Their own explanation seems to have shifted from “I draw because I like it” to “I draw to get the certificate.” Psychologists call this the overjustification effect. It does not mean that rewards always backfire: it depends on what the reward is, whether it was expected, and whether you already enjoyed the task. But it is a good warning for anything you do for love.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Lepper, Greene & Nisbett, 1973)
Why it's cool The next time you turn a hobby into a competition or a streak, ask yourself whether you are still doing it for the joy or just for the prize.
Read moreThe Puffer Jacket Began With a Man Who Nearly Froze to Death
Today the puffer is the default winter coat, but it started as a survival tool. In the mid-1930s, Eddie Bauer, an outdoorsman from Seattle, got dangerously cold on a fishing trip after his heavy wool jacket soaked through. He then designed a quilted jacket stuffed with goose down, and introduced it as the Skyliner in 1936. The quilting is the clever part: the stitched “puffs” keep the down from sliding to the bottom, so the warm air stays trapped where you need it. That is also why the silhouette looks so round, because the shape is the insulation. Fashion later borrowed it because an outfit that was built for function always looks confident. The tip for wearing one now: let the puffer be the big, soft shape, and keep everything under it sleek.
HistoryLink
Read moreA Song Gets Stuck in Your Head for Reasons Scientists Can Measure
In a 2016 study, psychologist Kelly Jakubowski and her team at Durham University asked about 3,000 people which songs got stuck in their heads most often. They compared the 100 most-named songs with 100 equally popular songs that nobody named. The sticky songs tended to be faster, and had a simple, common melodic shape, often rising in the first phrase and falling in the second. They also had a small quirk, like an odd leap or a repeated note. So an earworm is a tune that is easy to sing back but not boring enough to ignore.
Tell someone Earworms are not random: they are usually fast, simple to sing and have one tiny surprise in them.
Bread Does Not Go Stale Because It Dries Out
When bread bakes, its starch molecules swell with water and become soft and loose. As the loaf cools and sits, those molecules slowly line up again into tight, crystal-like structures. That process, called retrogradation, is what makes the crumb firm and crumbly. It happens fastest at fridge temperatures, which is why a loaf kept in the fridge goes stale sooner than one left on the counter. Freezing almost stops it, and warming a stale slice in the oven loosens the crystals again for a short while.
Tell someone Stale bread is not dry, it is bread whose starch has gone back to being crystals, and the fridge speeds it up.
Vampire Bats Share Their Dinner With Friends
Vampire bats can starve after only about two or three nights without a blood meal. So a well-fed bat will often regurgitate some of its meal into a hungry roostmate’s mouth. Biologists Gerald Wilkinson and Gerald Carter found that this is not only for family. In their experiments, how much a bat had been fed by another bat was a much better predictor of how much it fed that bat back than being related. Sharing builds friendships that work like insurance.
Tell someone Vampire bats keep track of who fed them and pay it back, which makes them some of the best friends in the animal kingdom.
un ver d’oreille
uhn VAIR dor-AY · noun phrase (masculine)
An earworm: a tune that plays on repeat in your head and refuses to leave.
« Depuis ce matin, j’ai un ver d’oreille : impossible d’arrêter de chantonner ce refrain ! »
Since this morning I’ve had an earworm: I just can’t stop humming that chorus!
It is a word-for-word borrowing of the German “Ohrwurm” (“ear worm”), which is also the German name for an earwig, the insect. French has an older, prettier image too: “un air qui trotte dans la tête”, a tune trotting around in your head. Use “ver d’oreille” when you want to complain about a song, and enjoy that you sound a little scientific.
The Case of the Silent Bell
On Saturday afternoon, the school’s gold debate trophy vanished from its glass case in the main hall. At exactly 4:00 p.m. a storm cut the power to the whole building, and it did not come back until 4:40. Every wall clock is plugged in, so all of them froze at 4:00. The trophy was taken during the blackout, and only three students were in the building. Omar says he was playing basketball in the dark gym with the coach the whole time, and the coach agrees. Lena says she was sketching by the window of the art room, and a teacher walking by saw her there. Rosa says she was in the library printing her essay: “It finished at 4:15, I know because I checked the wall clock, and then I went straight home.”
Who took the trophy, and what gives it away?
Reveal the answer
Rosa. Omar and Lena both have witnesses, but Rosa’s story cannot be true. The power was off from 4:00 to 4:40, so a printer could not have finished her essay at 4:15, and the wall clock she claims to have checked was frozen at 4:00. She invented a detail that only works if the electricity was on.
Overjustification effect: you love drawing so much that, once someone pays you for it, you start to wonder if you ever did. Which is why I will never accept money for naps.
What do you call a song that’s stuck in a bat’s head? An ear-worm with an echo.
Why is stale bread such a good listener? Because its starch has already realigned and it is just crystal clear.
Space It Out: The Study Trick That Beats Cramming
In 1885, German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus tested his own memory and found that new information fades quickly unless you revisit it. Later research found the fix: spread your studying out. A big review of 317 experiments (Cepeda and colleagues, 2006) showed that the same amount of study time gives better long-term memory when it is split over several days than when it is crammed into one session. Each time you nearly forget something and then pull it back, your brain marks it as important. Cramming feels productive because the facts are fresh, but they leave quickly. The best gap between sessions grows with how long you need to remember the material, so a test in a month calls for longer gaps than a test on Friday.
Try it today Pick one thing you studied today, set a reminder for tomorrow, and spend five minutes recalling it from memory before you open your notes.
Spotlight
Lise Meitner
Austrian-born physicist Lise Meitner worked out, with her nephew Otto Frisch, how a uranium nucleus could split in two, in 1938–39, just after she had to flee Nazi Germany. Frisch coined the word “fission”, borrowed from biology. The 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery went to her long-time colleague Otto Hahn alone. Today, element 109, meitnerium, carries her name. More →