According to 55 percent of 350,000 people from 70 countries who participated online in Richard Wiseman’s Laugh Lab experiment (discussed in last month’s column), this is the world’s funniest joke:

Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn’t seem to be breathing, and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps, “My friend is dead! What can I do?” The operator says, “Calm down. I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.” There is a silence, then a shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says, “Okay, now what?”

So say the data, but according to Wiseman’s personal narrative describing how the research was actually conducted (in his new book Quirkology), he believes that “we uncovered the world’s blandest joke — the gag that makes everyone smile but very few laugh out loud. But as with so many quests, the journey was far more important than the destination. Along the way we looked at what makes us laugh, how laughter can make you live longer, how humor should unite different nations, and we discovered the world’s funniest comedy animal.” Chickens notwithstanding, such first-person accounts in popular science books that include the journey and not just the destination afford readers a glimpse into how science is really carried out.

Formal science writing — what I call the “narrative of explanation” — presents a neat and tidy step-by-step process of Introduction- Methods-Results-Discussion, grounded in a nonexistent “scientific method” of Observation- Hypothesis-Prediction- Experiment followed in a linear fashion. This type of science writing is like autobiography, and as the comedian Stephen Wright said, “I’m writing an unauthorized autobiography.” Any other kind is fiction. Formal science writing is like Whiggish history — the conclusion draws the explanation toward it, forcing facts and events to fall neatly into a causal chain where the final outcome is an inevitable result of a logical and inevitable sequence.

Informal science writing — what I call the “narrative of practice” — presents the actual course of science as it is interwoven with periodic insights and subjective intuitions, random guesses and fortuitous findings. Science, like life, is messy and haphazard, full of quirky contingencies, unexpected bifurcations, serendipitous discoveries, unanticipated encounters and unpredictable outcomes. This chaotic process helps to explain, in part, the phenomenal success in recent decades of first-person popular accounts by scientists of how they actually did their research. The effect is especially noteworthy in works exploring the peculiarities of life.

Steven Levitt’s and Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics (William Morrow, 2006) illuminates the power of incentives through certain oddities. For instance, that most drug dealers live with their mothers because only the top guys make the big bucks while the rest bide their time and pay their dues or that baby names tell us about the motives of parents. Cornell University professor Robert Frank’s The Economic Naturalist: In Search of Explanations for Everyday Enigmas (Basic, 2007) employs the principle of costbenefit analysis to explain such idiosyncrasies as why drive-up ATM keypads have Braille dots (because it is cheaper to make the same machine for both drive-up and walk-up locations), why brown eggs are more expensive than white eggs (because there is less demand and the hens that lay them are larger and consume more food), why it is harder to find a taxi in the rain (because more people use them when it is raining, most cabbies reach their fare goals earlier in the day), and why milk is stored in rectangular cartons but soft drinks come in round cans (because it is handier to drink soda directly from a round can but easier to pour and store milk in a rectangular carton).

In my October column I railed against the artificial (and odious) ranking of technical science writing over popular science writing. I suggested that the latter should be elevated to a more exalted standing of “integrative science,” where good science writing integrates data, theory and narrative into a useful and compelling work. Here I add that exploring the minutiae of life, especially on the quirky borderlands of science, makes the scientific process more accessible to everyone. Where a narrative of explanation might read something like “the data lead me to conclude…,” a narrative of practice reads more like “Huh, that’s weird…”

Weirdness trumps data in the biography of science.

Using an index finger, trace the capital letter Q on your forehead. Which way did the tail of the Q slant?

What an odd thing to ask someone to do. Exploring weird things and why people believe them, however, is what I do for a living. Coming at science from the margins allows us to make an illuminating contrast between the normal and the paranormal, the natural and the supernatural, and the anomalous and the usual. The master at putting uncanny things to the experimental test — the man I call the Mythbuster of Magical Thinking — is University of Hertfordshire psychologist Richard Wiseman. His new book, Quirkology: How We Discover the Big Truths in Small Things (Basic, 2007), presents the results of his numerous (and often hilarious) experiments on all matters peculiar.

For instance, Wiseman explains that the Q test is a quick measure of “self-monitoring.” High self-monitors tend to draw the letter Q with the tail slanting to their left, so that someone facing them can read it. By temperament, they tend to focus outwardly: they are concerned with how other people see them, enjoy being the center of attention and adapt their actions to suit the situation. They are also skilled at manipulating others, Wiseman says, which makes them good at deception. And self-deception, apparently, which he discovered when he told these subjects what the experiment is supposed to measure — given that high self-monitors tended to claim (and apparently believe) that they traced the Q the opposite direction to how they actually drew it.

If that is not quirky enough, Wiseman once spent a day in Londons King’s Cross railway station asking the following question of individuals and of couples reuniting in a passionate embrace: “Excuse me, do you mind taking part in a psychology experiment? How many seconds have passed since I just said the words ‘Excuse me?’ ” Wiseman discovered that people in love significantly underestimated the passing of time. In other words, as the poets already know, times passes quickly when you’re in love.

Paranormal anomalies have long been a target of Wiseman’s experimental bow. To test the psychology of ghostly experiences, for example, Wiseman spent 10 days at Hampton Court Palace, having individuals walk through specific locations and describe any unusual experiences. He discovered that people who have a vivid imagination and are easily hypnotized reported a sensed presence and an uneasy feeling in the exact same locations where those with dry imaginations reported nothing. In a related study, Wiseman’s psychologist colleague James Houran of Southern Illinois University had subjects walk though an abandoned cinema and describe how it made them feel. One group of subjects was told that the building was haunted, and the other group was told that it was being renovated. The “haunted” group reported significantly more unusual experiences than the other group.

In search of a normal explanation for such apparently paranormal enigmas, Wiseman conducted an experiment in a London concert hall in which he had participants listen to and rate the emotional experience of a performance by acclaimed Russian pianist GéNIA. At two different times during the performance, Wiseman piped in extremely low frequency infrasound waves that are inaudible to the human ear but are known to cause an internal vibratory feeling in the head and chest that can be experienced in a deeply emotional way. (NASA once tested infrasound waves on astronauts to measure the effect of rocket engines during launch.) He found that 22 percent of the 400 subjects noted unusual experiences during the infrasound conditions, reporting such feelings as “shivering on my wrist, odd feeling in stomach”; “increased heart rate, ears fluttering, anxious”; “felt like being in a jet before it takes off”; and “preorgasmic tension in body and arms, but not in legs.”

Other quirkiness reported by Wiseman includes why there are a disproportionate number of marine biologists called Dr. Fish (names do matter, it turns out); the best wording of a donation solicitation (adding “even a penny helps” doubles the giving rate); superior pickup lines (not boring, such as “Do you come here often?” but silly, such as “If you were a pizza topping, what would you be?”); the most effective personal ads (a 70 to 30 ratio between “this is me” and “this is what I’m looking for”); and the world’s funniest joke: “Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses… ,” which I’ll finish next month, when I explain what weirdonomics and quirkology reveal about how science actually works.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a neuromuscular disease that attacks motor neurons until muscle weakness, atrophy and paralysis lead inexorably to death. Victims of this monstrous malady could be forgiven for feeling unlucky.

How, then, can we explain the attitude of the disease’s namesake, baseball great Lou Gehrig? He told a sellout crowd at Yankee Stadium: “For the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth.” The Iron Horse then recounted his many blessings and fortunes, a list twice punctuated with “I’m lucky” and “That’s something.”

Clearly, luck is a state of mind. Is it more than that? To explore this question scientifically, experimental psychologist Richard Wiseman created a “luck lab” at the University of Hertfordshire in England. Wiseman began by testing whether those who believe they are lucky are actually more likely to win the lottery. He recruited 700 subjects who had intended to purchase lottery tickets to complete his luck questionnaire, which is a self-report scale that measures whether people consider themselves to be lucky or unlucky. Although lucky people were twice as confident as the unlucky ones that they would win the lottery, there was no difference in winnings.

Wiseman then gave subjects a standardized “life satisfaction” scale, which asks individuals to rank themselves on how satisfied they are with their family life, personal life, financial situation, health and career. The results were striking. “Lucky people are far more satisfied with all areas of their lives than unlucky or neutral people,” Wiseman reveals in his charming and insightful book, The Luck Factor (Miramax Books, 2003).

Does this satisfied state of mind translate into actual life outcomes that someone might call lucky? It does. Here’s how. Wiseman gave subjects the “big five” personality scale, which measures “agreeableness,” “conscientiousness,” “extroversion,” “neuroticism” and “openness.” Although there were no differences between lucky and unlucky people on agreeableness and conscientiousness, Wiseman found significant differences for extroversion, neuroticism and openness.

Lucky people score significantly higher than unlucky people on extroversion. “There are three ways in which lucky people’s extroversion significantly increases the likelihood of their having a lucky chance encounter,” Wiseman explains: “meeting a large number of people, being a ‘social magnet’ and
keeping in contact with people.” Lucky people, for example, smile twice as often and engage in more eye contact than unlucky people do, which leads to more social encounters, which generates more opportunities.

The neuroticism dimension measures how anxious or relaxed someone is, and Wiseman found that the lucky ones were half as anxious as the unlucky ones — that is, “because lucky people tend to be more relaxed than most, they are more likely to notice chance opportunities, even when they are not expecting them.” In one experiment, Wiseman had volunteers count the number of photographs in a newspaper. Lucky subjects were more likely to notice on page two the half-page ad with the message in large bold type: STOP COUNTING—THERE ARE 43 PHOTOGRAPHS IN THIS NEWSPAPER.

Wiseman discovered that lucky people also score significantly higher in openness than unlucky people do. “Lucky people are open to new experiences in their lives … They don’t tend to be bound by convention and they like the notion of unpredictability,” he notes. As such, lucky people travel more, encounter novel prospects and welcome unique opportunities.

Expectation also plays a role in luck. Lucky people expect good things to happen, and when they do they embrace them. But even in the face of adversity, lucky people turn bad breaks into good fortune. Consider the example set by one of the longest ALS sufferers in history, Stephen W. Hawking, who writes: “I was lucky to have chosen to work in theoretical physics, because that was one of the few areas in which my condition would not be a serious handicap.” Unable to move and confined to a wheelchair, Hawking has capitalized on his fate by using it as a chance to transform our understanding of the universe, which he has. That’s something.