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The Last Word
AORN JOURNAL
AUGUST 1987. VOL. 46. NO 2
TheLast Word 0 Didn’t Freud have a theory that if you don’t let children eat dirt, they can become either obsessively orderly or inordinately sloppy adults? Or, maybe that was a popular theory of mothers. Nevertheless, we couldn’t resist reading an Associated Press report in the American Medical News on “How much dirt do kids eat.” According to the report, researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, studied the diaper contents of 65 children between the ages of one and three to find out how much dirt made its way into their diets. The results of the study can be used to set safety standards for levels of pollutants in soil, the report said. For the two-week study, the families of the children were paid $500 to keep the used diapers on ice until researchers picked them up at the end of each day in a special truck that freezedried them. About 4,000 diapers were collected. Also collected were samples of dirt from around the families’ residences and duplicates of everything the children ate. If a mother made a peanut butter sandwich for her child, she also made an extra one and stuck it in a plastic bag for the researchers. In addition to diapers, the families received the same brand of bottom wipes and toothpaste, so they could be eliminated as variables in the study results. According to the report, one of the researchers said that this is the only study he knows of that required $7,000 worth of diapers and the rental of a forklift for a month.
0 In addition to whether they should or should not eat dirt, most humans are also taught in early childhood that cheating doesn’t pay. Yet in the rest of the animal kingdom, cheaters are often winners, according to Omni. A field zoologist of the New York Zoological Society has found two species of birds (whitewinged shriketanager and bluish-slate antshrike) in the Peruvian Amazon who earn their livings I 2
by cheating their neighbors with false alarms. The two species play the role of sentinels in complex, mixed communities of birds by sounding loud alarm cries whenever a hawk appears. But, the zoologst found that the birds also sounded their alarm cries when racing other birds to catch an insect. According to the article, the zoologist believes that the false alarm cries of the sentinels may distract the competing birds just long enough to give them an advantage in the bug chase. He also believes that the victims of this deceit probably catch on, but it is still to their advantage to check out any alarm cry. If the cry is false, the bird loses a bug. If the cry is true, the bird could lose his life. In this instance, said the zoologist, the lying bird gets the worm.
0 And speaking of loud cries, have you ever wondered why almost everyone shivers at the sound of a fingernail tieing scraped across a blackboard? Could this be a instinctive behavior inherited from our primate ancestors? According to Omni, researchers at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill, think so. The automatic, almost visceral reaction to this sound made the researchers wonder whether it mimics some naturally occurring, innately aversive event. To find that event, they used a spectrogram to develop an acoustic voiceprint of the sound of a garden rake being dragged across a piece of slate-a sound acoustically indistinguishable from blackboard screech. They compared that voiceprint with the voiceprint of warning cries of macaque monkeys, and found that the two sounds bore a very close resemblance. The findings suggest that the behavior is an inherited instinct, and that the human brain still registers a strong vestigial response to this chilling sound. We wonder how many of you readmg this had the same visceral response we did when writing it?
AUGUST 1987. VOL. 46. NO 2
TheLast Word 0 Didn’t Freud have a theory that if you don’t let children eat dirt, they can become either obsessively orderly or inordinately sloppy adults? Or, maybe that was a popular theory of mothers. Nevertheless, we couldn’t resist reading an Associated Press report in the American Medical News on “How much dirt do kids eat.” According to the report, researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, studied the diaper contents of 65 children between the ages of one and three to find out how much dirt made its way into their diets. The results of the study can be used to set safety standards for levels of pollutants in soil, the report said. For the two-week study, the families of the children were paid $500 to keep the used diapers on ice until researchers picked them up at the end of each day in a special truck that freezedried them. About 4,000 diapers were collected. Also collected were samples of dirt from around the families’ residences and duplicates of everything the children ate. If a mother made a peanut butter sandwich for her child, she also made an extra one and stuck it in a plastic bag for the researchers. In addition to diapers, the families received the same brand of bottom wipes and toothpaste, so they could be eliminated as variables in the study results. According to the report, one of the researchers said that this is the only study he knows of that required $7,000 worth of diapers and the rental of a forklift for a month.
0 In addition to whether they should or should not eat dirt, most humans are also taught in early childhood that cheating doesn’t pay. Yet in the rest of the animal kingdom, cheaters are often winners, according to Omni. A field zoologist of the New York Zoological Society has found two species of birds (whitewinged shriketanager and bluish-slate antshrike) in the Peruvian Amazon who earn their livings I 2
by cheating their neighbors with false alarms. The two species play the role of sentinels in complex, mixed communities of birds by sounding loud alarm cries whenever a hawk appears. But, the zoologst found that the birds also sounded their alarm cries when racing other birds to catch an insect. According to the article, the zoologist believes that the false alarm cries of the sentinels may distract the competing birds just long enough to give them an advantage in the bug chase. He also believes that the victims of this deceit probably catch on, but it is still to their advantage to check out any alarm cry. If the cry is false, the bird loses a bug. If the cry is true, the bird could lose his life. In this instance, said the zoologist, the lying bird gets the worm.
0 And speaking of loud cries, have you ever wondered why almost everyone shivers at the sound of a fingernail tieing scraped across a blackboard? Could this be a instinctive behavior inherited from our primate ancestors? According to Omni, researchers at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill, think so. The automatic, almost visceral reaction to this sound made the researchers wonder whether it mimics some naturally occurring, innately aversive event. To find that event, they used a spectrogram to develop an acoustic voiceprint of the sound of a garden rake being dragged across a piece of slate-a sound acoustically indistinguishable from blackboard screech. They compared that voiceprint with the voiceprint of warning cries of macaque monkeys, and found that the two sounds bore a very close resemblance. The findings suggest that the behavior is an inherited instinct, and that the human brain still registers a strong vestigial response to this chilling sound. We wonder how many of you readmg this had the same visceral response we did when writing it?