Eye - 01 March 2024
From On this day to A romantic tale
On this day
The ‘Science Notes’ column in the Friend of 1895 piqued Eye’s curiosity in the 1 March edition, with its note on the consequences of deep pondering.
J Edmund Clark wrote: ‘That the brain grows heavier when we think may be shown in a curious way. If a man lies down on a board very carefully balanced at the centre, and is then made to think hard, his head goes down and heels rise. This is because thinking causes an extra flow of blood to the brain, and thus withdraws it, especially, from the feet. Hence the common result of cold feet when one has to think hard.’
Writing later in his book Fear (1896), the scientist whose experiment he was describing, Angelo Mosso, said: ‘This phenomenon is constant, whatever pains the subject may take not to move… It was always a pleasant sight to my colleagues, visiting me during my researches, when they found some friend or acquaintance sleeping on the balance… it often happened that one of them would grow drowsy, and be rocked to sleep by the uniform oscillation of this scientific cradle.’
Eye discovered an article in Science News from 2014 confirming that this phenomenon is true! Scientists at the University of Reading ran a modern-day version of the experiment that verified the findings. So, next time you’re concentrating, make sure you have slippers nearby!
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