Two bits of news piqued my interest this week. A political scientist from Dartmouth has done extensive research into why most of us get angry when someone presents solid evidence that our deeply held beliefs are wrong. On first reading, I wondered if this chap was a professor emeritus at the MISPWOSO, the Maximegalion Institute for Slowly and Painfully Working Out the Surprisingly Obvious, a university concocted by that comedic genius Douglas Adams to describe a galactic-level academic institution dedicated solely to the sort of research that, for instance, uses Quantum Topography and String Theory to prove that poorly played violins cause migraines. But on second reading, I was convinced that there was more to this than meets the eye.
It takes me back to a time when I was in Class XI and a casual reading of Resnick & Halliday had suddenly armed me with the intellectual equivalent of a baseball bat and a bad attitude to go with it. One afternoon, when I had returned from school, I found that our house-owner, a lady, had assembled a religious mob of sorts and was actively recruiting all school students into it. Some quick enquiries revealed that she had come to know, like Moses at Sinai, that an idol of Ganesha nearby had suddenly developed a voracious appetite for milk and that this represented a moment of faith, a miracle of supernatural proportions that immediately necessitated a mob of chanting school children led by aforementioned houseowner.
I joined the procession, even chanting paeans to the elephant god's amazing lactose tolerance and when we reached the idol in question, Messrs. Resnick and Co. whispered “Cough Cough, capillary effect, milk, marble” into my ears. I then uttered the one line most religious people do not want to hear – “This is not a miracle, it's physics”. The houseowner lady gave me the sort of look senior Taliban commanders might at a Powerpoint presentation of Mohammad cartoons.
Fast forwarding to our researcher at Dartmouth, his point was really directed towards journalists and how they should craft stories that question common (wrongly held) beliefs. Simply saying for instance, “Research proves that writing Sriramajayam a 1000 times does not cure heart disease” only makes people (and pen and notebook manufacturers) angry and they tend to go on an expedition to seek out new ways to justify their false beliefs. My grandmother once summarised this Dartmouth professor's findings in a simple sentence – “Be gentle when you want to prove someone wrong”.
The other bit of science that interested me this week was a Washington University study on why yoghurt (and curd) helps digest food better. As south Indians, we have always known this to be true, but it is always useful to be armed with a few Latin words for bacteria and biotechnological jargon to reassure ourselves about our culinary superiority. Turns out that bacteria in curd actually alters gene expression in the microbes present in our stomachs to achieve that immensely satisfying feeling one gets after wolfing down curd rice.
So being proved wrong makes us angry, and anger causes indigestion and curd rice cures indigestion. No wonder, then, that my grandmother's solution to the problem of worldwide conflict was for everyone to eat curd rice.
