• Question: Hello! What is the weirdest thing you have discovered?

    Asked by may13128 to Freya, Carolyn on 8 Jan 2018.
    • Photo: Carolyn McGettigan

      Carolyn McGettigan answered on 8 Jan 2018:

      I’m not sure I’ve discovered anything very weird… but I’ve certainly encountered things that were surprising and not predicted.

      One good example is in a study I ran when I worked in Sophie Scott’s lab at UCL. We were interested in how a specific part of the brain – the motor cortex – responded to hearing different types of laughter. The motor cortex of the brain controls the movements of parts of the body, including the voice. We had a strong prediction that this part would respond more strongly to hearing laughs that were real (compared with fake laughs) because we thought that listeners would activate their motor cortex more strongly for contagious (real) laughs. Instead, we found that another region in the front of the brain showed a really strong difference, where it showed stronger activation to *fake* laughs. The brain region we saw is typically involved in trying to work out the mental state of other people. This taught us something quite useful about the social importance of laughter, because we found that our listeners were automatically engaging that part of the brain as soon as they heard laughs that were not authentic.

    • Photo: Freya Wilson

      Freya Wilson answered on 9 Jan 2018:

      I’m not sure about weird, but something that broke my brain when I thought about it too hard…

      There’s no such thing as ‘truly random’. If you flip a coin millions of times you’d expect it to have 50/50 heads and tails if it was a ‘fair’ coin. (Meaning, it is completely random) But the probability of getting 50/50 heads and tails actually decreases the more you flip it. This means that if you flip a fair coin enough times, there will always be a bias result.

      In my lab we use this fact as the basis for secret communications.

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