What becomes of the broken-hearted? Scientists investigate

Science of love

“Losing and ending a romantic relationship is one of the most painful losses adults experience,” begins a BAS (bountifully acronymed study) by researchers in Germany and Iran, published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research.

This is science at its most overtly romantic: electromagnetically stimulating the brains of suddenly lovelorn volunteers. This is also science at its most acronymic: tDCS (transcranial direct current stimulation), DLPFC (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex), VLPFC (ventrolateral prefrontal cortex) and LTS (love trauma syndrome).

For those in the throes of lost love, one passage begs to be voiced as a rooftop soliloquy at midnight: “36 participants with love trauma syndrome were randomized in three tDCS condition (left DLPFC, right VLPFC, sham stimulation). LTS symptoms, treatment-related outcome variables (depressive state, anxiety, emotion regulation, positive and negative affect), and cognitive functions were assessed before, right after, and one month after intervention.”

That assessment, say the researchers, showed that brain zapping “improves LTS symptoms”. But, they warn for all science, “there is a great research gap about ‘Love Trauma Syndrome’, what exactly are its symptoms and which diagnostic criteria are important”.

Smoking out smells

Kevin Lee detects some possible cause and effect in the doings of London’s (and the world’s) perhaps-first celebrity pathologist.

He writes: “I am a retired forensic pathologist, and as can easily be imagined, I have been asked innumerable times how I manage to deal with the smell. Apart from the old trick of smiling innocently and asking: ‘Smell, what smell?’ The very simple fact is that I do still have an acute sense of smell, and am quite able to detect the various smells of decomposition even when they are quite weak. I have managed to train myself to adopt a fairly neutral approach to these pongs, so that, although I am fully aware of them, after one good sniff, they no longer feature as a problem.

“The recent article [Feedback, 15 June] about Sir Bernard Spilsbury, the very famous forensic pathologist of the early 20th century, described him as having an extremely defective sense of smell. If he did in fact have such a defect, I would believe that it was most likely due to the fact that he was a heavy smoker, getting through around 50 cigarettes a day. He may also just have employed the same technique that I have since used.”

Slice of life

Body parts, alive (elbow), dead (hair), nominal (leg) and sliced, figure in this note from UK reader Gerald Legg: “Your recent piece ‘Splitting hairs’ (20 July) reminded me of my time at Manchester University. My PhD research involved a lot of microtome work using the old, but still functional, Cambridge rocking microtome [a specialist cutting device].

“I was taught how to sharpen blades using a sheet of plate glass and cerium dioxide. Prior to use, a blade would be honed, checked under x40 to make sure there were no nicks in it, and then tested. The test: splitting a hair. A sharp blade should be able to cut a hair three times, raising small curling pieces still attached to the body of the hair, before cutting the hair right through.

“The lab had a sharp knife – a fact that I discovered when I put my elbow on it and heard a thunk as it cut to the bone, but I didn’t feel a thing.

“A quick trip to Manchester hospital, just down the road, followed by a couple of stitches soon fixed it and I was able to go back to the lab, and continue my serial sectioning with the same blade.”

Remain nameless

When their students make tangible contributions to science, some teachers find a way to publicly acknowledge the who, what and where – especially if those students made unusual sacrifices.

Such may be the case with a preprint study called “Investigation of bactericidal effect of earwax on Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus isolated from skin and stool samples of undergraduate students, Federal University of Agriculture Makurdi, Benue State, Nigeria“.

Credit, in academia, has its limits. The individual students aren’t identified by name.

Simple pleasures

“Simplify, simplify, simplify” is an old rule of thumb, especially among scientists. To honour the adage, Feedback is compiling a document collection called “Simplify, Simplify, Simplify”.

The assemblage’s first item is a report titled “Politicians’ uniquely simple personalities”. Published in the 6 February 1997 issue of Nature, this study says that politicians’ personalities can be reduced to a set of just two or three numbers – a stark contrast to the whopping five numbers that psychologists claim are necessary to judge normal people.

The authors of that work were awarded the 2003 Ig Nobel psychology prize.

If you have the simple pleasure of finding another good example, please send it (along with citation details) to: Simple pleasures, care of Feedback.

Marc Abrahams created the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and co-founded the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Earlier, he worked on unusual ways to use computers. His website is improbable.com.

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