May your daze be merry
A recent study builds on more than half a century of experiments to see whether people think they hear Bing Crosby crooning White Christmas.
Crosby鈥檚 recording of the song, released in 1942, became enduringly popular. In the 1960s, Theodore Xenophon Barber at the Medfield Foundation in Massachusetts and his colleagues began using White Christmas 鈥� and also not using it 鈥� as an . Volunteers were told to listen carefully, then to indicate whether they heard a song playing. There was no song to hear, just ambient noise or, in some experiments, generated white noise. In virtually every test, lots of people said they heard, or thought they may have heard, White Christmas.
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One approach was to hypnotise each test subject before the listen-to-this session began. A Barber in 1964 sketched the impressiveness of the hypnosis protocol: 鈥淭he subject was asked to fixate on a light blinking in synchrony with the sound of a metronome and was given a standard hypnotic induction procedure adapted from the induction procedures of Friedlander and Sarbin, Marcuse, and
脕goston at E枚tv枚s Lor谩nd University in Hungary and her colleagues, used White Christmas to 鈥渆xplore the effects of acute caffeine intake and acute stress on perceptual distortions鈥�. It builds on an earlier Australian that warned of the danger 鈥� of hearing an imaginary Bing Crosby, and perhaps of other hallucinations 鈥� when caffeine is added to a stressful life. The new study suggests that the stress is more potent than the caffeine in bringing on White Christmas.
Seasonal upswing
Do seasonal holidays bring a predictable rise in the total number of alive-and-kicking humans? Research suggests that, firstly, the answer is predictably jumbled, and, secondly, it is likely to be marred by manipulations and errors in birth records.
A called 鈥淎re the birthdates of our ancestors real? Date of birth misregistration in twentieth-century Poland鈥� meanders with dry glee through some of the manipulated mess. This flavour of numerical high jinks, it points out, isn鈥檛 unique to Poland.
Another called 鈥淗oliday, just one day out of life: birth timing and postnatal outcomes鈥� concentrates on the input, rather than the output, phase of the (re)production cycle. It analyses 鈥渟exual activity data collected from over 500,000 individuals鈥�.
Two patterns become especially clear. The first is general: 鈥淔or all locations, New Year had the highest magnitude increase in sexual activity. This was comparable to the increase in sexual activity measured in Brazil during Carnival and Valentine鈥檚 Day in the US and UK. Brazil was the country in which sexual activity was consistently higher around holidays.鈥�
The second pattern is more specific: 鈥淥ne pattern consistent among countries was decreased sexual activity in the three days before Christmas, which was followed by elevated sexual activity on Christmas and the three days after.鈥�
This information may be stimulating, but the researchers confess disappointment about what it can explain. There is a mismatch, they write, between the aggregate data-in and infant-out numbers. 鈥淪easonal sexual activity alone,鈥� they explain, 鈥渨ould generate birth peaks in each country that do not match the peaks observed in the time series of births.鈥�
A study published in 1999 exposes one aspect of that statistical mystery by comparing two questions. When did the birth officially happen? And when did the child actually appear? The is called 鈥淭axes and the timing of births鈥�.
Seasonal downswing
Do seasonal holidays bring a predictable drop in the total number of alive-and-kicking humans (or, to phrase it more strenuously, a rise in the number who kick the bucket)? Research suggests that here, too, the answer is predictably jumbled and manipulation of the deaths records not only occurs, but sometimes happens to save oodles of money.
Complexities abound. For example, there is the holiday gift conundrum, as explored in a new in The Journal of Heart and Lung Transplantation called 鈥淗eart transplant offers are less likely to be accepted on weekends, holidays, and conferences鈥�. Other studies poke at the deadliness of particular holidays, such as and .
Inevitably, money croons a deathly tune. A 2003 nods to the birth-and-taxes issue noted above in accounting for what happens at the end of life. 鈥淒ying to save taxes: evidence from estate-tax returns on the death elasticity鈥� says: 鈥淲e investigate the temporal pattern of deaths around the time of changes in the estate-tax system periods when living longer, or dying sooner, could significantly affect estate-tax liability. We find some evidence that there is a small death elasticity, although we cannot rule out that what we have uncovered is ex post doctoring of the reported date of death.鈥�
And now, pursued by a barely heard Bing Crosby, onward, fellow Feedbackians, to 2023!
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