CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Hello and welcome to QI,
which tonight is simply sensational,
so keep your eyes open, your ears peeled,
your nostrils flared, your tongue hanging out
and your hands to yourself as we meet.
A sight for sore eyes, it's Jessica Fostekew.
APPLAUSE
A touch of class, Roisin Conaty.
APPLAUSE
A taste of heaven, Aisling Bea. Oh!
APPLAUSE
And somehow still here, Alan Davies.
APPLAUSE
And their sounds are a feast for the senses.
Jessica goes.
# I see trees of green... Oh, lovely!
# Red roses, too. #
Roisin goes...
# I hear music
# Mighty fine music. #
Aisling goes...
MUSIC: U Can't Touch This
Oh, yeah.
Alan goes...
# Oh, I think I smell a rat
# Oh, I think I smell a rat. #
LAUGHTER
Sorry about that.
Don't know what to make of that.
Now, on with the questions.
What's the main sense that a typist uses?
Sense of foreboding,
because you're soon to be unemployed
because of the never-ending advancement of technology?
That is a very good idea.
There are, as I think Alan will know from previous episodes,
there are more than five senses. It depends on how you define them.
There are between nine and 26, to be honest. Oh!
But we are thinking of one called proprioception.
You know the oceptions.
Yes. We are talking... Ah, proprioception!
A lovely man, but a racist.
LAUGHTER
It's also known as kinaesthesia.
It's the body's ability to sense its movement
and location without looking.
It's why we don't have to look at our feet when we walk,
or we don't have to look at the fork when we eat.
It allows the body to perform simultaneous actions
without stopping to think about each one separately,
so you can dribble a basketball while running.
And touch-typing is achieved through this, through proprioception,
knowing where the keys are without looking.
The only thing that you really need in order to get started is,
you know the F and the J have a little raised thing on them...
Yes, that's why they're there!
I wondered why they had a nipple. That's it!
I thought they were the keyboard's boobs.
Jess just texted me like, "F, J, F, J, F, J, F, J..."
I'm like, "All right, Jess."
SHE CLEARS HER THROAT
When I was in school, we, all the girls, were taught to touch-type
and to do speedwriting or shorthand.
The way we were taught was, you had a black apron
that went over the back of the typewriter
and round the back of your neck.
Then you had to put your hands in underneath.
I bet all sorts went on under there.
More than one use for a space bar.
Yeah.
LAUGHTER
POSH VOICE: Well, actually, Alan,
a lot of good novels are written there, so up yours.
I type so much now that I think better
by not looking.
If you have to handwrite, it takes forever.
Have you handwritten a letter recently? It's hell.
By the third page, it looked like I was sending, like, a death threat.
I'd lost all patience. I was just, like, scrawling.
Literally, I can't... There's no way to sustain this.
I just had to end the letter with, "Things are fine. The end."
Yeah.
You need proprioception, all of us do, in order, for example,
to touch your nose with your eyes shut.
So, if you shut your eyes and try and touch your nose. No problem.
Oh...
I slowed down when I did it,
cos I genuinely thought I was going way off.
I definitely went round the houses. When would you be way off?
When is an example of when you would be way off?
I've no idea, Sandi, if you get my drift.
Drunk. Yeah, it's one of the sobriety tests that are used.
There's sort of five standard impairment tests the police use.
Any idea what the other ones are when checking for drink-driving?
Walking one foot in front of the other.
Yeah, so heel-toe, walking in a straight line.
Standing on one leg is another one.
Checking the pupils aren't too big or your eyes too watery.
And the internal clock test. Ooh.
So you shut your eyes and see when you think 30 seconds have passed
and if you're piddled, you can't do it. You fall asleep.
There is a quick way to demonstrate proprioception,
so put an arm in the air with a fist clenched, OK,
but your thumb sticking out.
Close your eyes and grab your thumb with your thumb and forefinger
on the other hand.
For a second, I thought I could cheat by watching everyone else.
Is someone undoing my flies?
Well, I have to get the fun where I can, Alan.
Just looking for the space bar.
Yeah.
So, it's along with our sense of touch, temperature, pain, movement,
it's all part of what's called the somatosensory system.
So, it's the sensation that can occur anywhere on the body
as opposed to in a particular organ like the eye.
Have you noticed, though, that the amount people touch each other
varies with culture?
There was a Canadian psychologist in 1966 called Sidney Jourard
and he studied couples in coffee bars around the world -
both romantic and platonic, same, opposite sex and so on.
Couples in Puerto Rico touch each other 180 times an hour. OK?
Couples in Paris...
..110 times an hour.
London?
Oh, no, it's going to be heartbreaking, isn't it? One? Never.
Never. Never. Never.
Not at all.
Absolutely zero.
"Don't touch, eurgh!" Whoa.
But then there's, like, creeps, who are a culture unto themselves.
Yeah. And they can be from anywhere. Imagine if someone's like,
"Oh, don't worry, I'm just being Brazilian!"
"I feel like I'm in Paris - that's why I'm doing it!"
"I know it's not London, but I'm a Parisian Londoner!"
OK, if you're a bit Parisian, I suppose, but...
Only because of QI am I letting you do this.
What about... Are the Irish more tactile?
I think we're more hitty
and this sort of, like, "Stop it! No! Seriously, go on!"
That "stop it", "seriously" - you push and you shove a lot more.
And here, that comes across as quite aggressive. Yes.
I think they touch more than the English on the whole -
whether it's gentle is a different story!
But you'll be piled in together a bit more. Yeah.
Right, moving on.
During the Renaissance, who ate better than a king?
Would it be maybe the king's, like, servant or, like, waiter? Why?
Because I had lots of waiting jobs as a teenager
and I ate loads, I ate loads of the stuff off the plates.
You were heading in the right direction,
but not quite getting there.
Cos they'd have a poison tester with a king or queen. Poison tester.
Yes. It's the poison tester.
They would taste everything in Renaissance Europe
that the royal had to eat
and also large amounts of it, not just a nibble.
If it was just a nibble, you wouldn't pick up enough poison.
They had to eat spoonfuls from the royal plate.
If it was beautifully intact,
say it had a sort of pastry lid or something,
they would have to break it open and dip bread in.
By the time the poor royal received their meal,
it was probably cold and half-eaten or demolished, in fact.
And then, on top of that, it had to be bland
because strong flavours, of course, would...
What if the poison tester's the poisoner?
Genius! There's Murder She Wrote. The novel writes itself.
AISLING HUMS
Just constantly making out things look dodgy.
I don't know... Ohh. Like...
If it's like something with rhubarb in it,
like, you're fine, no-one would poison rhubarb. Eat it.
Or a Brussels sprout.
There was a physician called Ambroise Pare,
who was a physician to four kings of France
and he wrote in 1585,
"Anybody afraid of being poisoned should be wary of meats
"cooked with much art, very sweet, salty, sour
"or notably endued with any other taste."
So... Was he my Uncle Alan?
LAUGHTER
When I was on holiday in Vietnam, there was this hotel in Saigon,
which was where a lot of the foreign correspondents stayed
during the war. And there was so much sickness
and food poisoning and general unwellness that they trusted nothing
except... bottle of whisky and a hard-boiled egg.
Those were the only things that they thought
there was no way you could get ill from.
I see nothing wrong with that diet!
As a basic diet, it's all right, isn't it?
LAUGHTER Keep you going till lunch. Yeah!
My brother and a few friends of mine served as foreign correspondents
in Beirut when there was terrible troubles there. Ah.
And they used to go to the same bar every night.
There was a parrot that learnt to do the sound of incoming missiles.
All of the foreign journalists knew this,
and the parrot would start to do the sound of the incoming missile
and anybody who'd never been before was diving for cover
and getting out of the chairs and the journalists were all like,
"It's the parrot." What a good plot device! Amazing!
It's something to show that someone's like,
"Oh, yes, I've been here 100 times!" Then...
SHE WHISTLES
And he's like, "They didn't know about the parrot!"
# Do, do, doo... #
In Pare's time, it was believed that bezoar stones
could cure the effects of any poison.
Anybody know what a bezoar stone is? There is one.
A badly-cooked potato.
Well, it's a food-related thing. Is it?
Is it something's turd?
You are the closest.
Oh! It's an undigested mass found in the digestive system.
Bleurgh! Bezoar is Persian for antidote or counter-poison.
The theory was that if you had a bezoar stone, it would cure you,
so they decided to do a test on this and they performed an experiment.
This same guy, Pare, that I was telling you about,
this 16th-century physician,
he performed an experiment on a cook at the king's court.
The cook had been caught stealing some fine silver cutlery
and he was sentenced to death by hanging,
so the cook agreed to be poisoned instead,
and Pare then used the bezoar stone to cure him.
Cook died in agony seven
ROISIN GASPS
Yeah. Wait, I'm confused. It didn't work.
Is that an old poo?
No, it's undigested stuff from inside the digestive...
It's got the makings of a poo,
but it never got out. Yeah. It's a poo foetus.
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh! It's a potential poo.
It's a wannabe poo. ROISIN: It's a potential poo.
Yeah. It's not.... All poos are equal under God's eyes.
Don't touch it. Wait for it to come out.
God intended out the back. Out the back!
They were really malleable.
They could be worth ten times their weight in gold. Who's buying these?
But did they have to cut open a person to get them out?
No, I don't think you can go up the back and find it.
Yeah, just have a rummage.
I don't think that... It's like... That's more like Bollywood.
It's a bit late to tell me that now, Alan.
You've got your evening planned.
LAUGHTER
They mostly came out of animals like goats and not humans, so...
It's a bit disconcerting that it's sort of nestling
in a Moses basket. Yeah. We do love him.
Now, we were going to get rid of him at one stage,
but now, I have to say, absolutely over the moon
with this bezoar stone.
Only a mother could love it.
Royalty would often own several.
They would have some of them set as jewellery. Hmm.
And then not only was the food tested, Queen Elizabeth I's
ladies-in-waiting would try on all her clothing in the morning
just to make sure that wasn't poisoned as well.
I mean, it was a very, very big deal. Wow.
Pulling a bra off and handing it over.
And probably pointless, because most poisons take hours to take effect.
Yeah. So you'd really have to wait a bloody long time
for seeing if your taster keeled over.
She was probably just trying to plan her outfit as well, though. Yeah.
You like to see it on someone else sometimes.
"Well, it could be poisoned!" rather than, "I want to see what goes."
And turn around in case there's poison round the back.
"Yeah, I think that's poisoned. Next!"
THEY CHUCKLE
This is Cleopatra trying out poisons on people
just to see which ones are... which ones are doing well.
I don't like to call women difficult because I always question it,
but I feel like that's a difficult woman thing to do,
to try out poisons on people to see what they look like, you know?
I like her fashion sense, though.
I think that looks very comfortable. Mm.
Time now for a sensory demonstration.
I'm going to give you a hearing test.
OK, let me get out my little keyboard.
Oh. Here we go.
Now, you should have some whiteboards and some pens there.
Yes. So, I'm going to play you two notes.
You have to write down which is higher or lower.
OK, so I'm going to play this note... Don't look!
And then this note. Higher or lower?
OK? So, what's everybody got?
Higher. Higher? Hmm.
Higher? Yeah.
Yes, it's correct. It's absolutely right. Oh, God!
Good. OK. OK, fine.
So, now we're going to play you some stuff
that has been created by a computer,
and I'm going to play you three sets and I want you to write down,
on each occasion, whether the second note
is higher or lower.
OK, really simple. Yeah, OK. Really simple.
Did the note go up or did the note go down? Here we go.
SHE PLAYS TWO NOTES
Up or down?
We only get one go? Yeah.
OK, next one.
SHE PLAYS TWO NOTES
Up or down?
Well, that's very tricky, isn't it?
Yes.
I feel like there's more than one note sneaking in there each time.
And the third one?
SHE PLAYS TWO NOTES
Oh, Roisin was very confident with that one.
Probably wrong. OK. Turn all the boards around.
Let's have a quick look.
So, you have got lower, lower, higher.
You have basically got lower, higher, higher.
Lower, higher, lower.
Higher, lower, higher. I mean, they're all different.
Is this gold dress, blue dress, but for the ears? Yes!
It is an auditory illusion.
I'd just like to point out that I haven't drawn a cock and balls.
LAUGHTER
Do you want to do it now? Would you feel better?
I think, in terms of children,
you'd say this was a developmental milestone.
Are you saying that this is a sign of maturity?
So, the truth is that what you were listening to,
the tones go both up and down.
It is called the tritone paradox.
So there's two notes effectively being played.
It's like C and F sharp at the same time. Ah.
And then the next note is one in the middle.
And the consequence of that is, it's both higher and lower,
depending on which seemed...
That's what you said, there was more than one note.
..more prominent, so you are all correct.
It doesn't really matter which you put,
whether you put up or down, higher or lower.
Shall we hear it again? See if you can hear it now.
TWO NOTES PLAY
See, if that was your doorbell...
TWO NOTES PLAY
It's very annoying, isn't it? It's just an illusion,
so that it sounds as if, frankly, it could go up and down,
but what's most interesting about it, it was analysed
by a music psychologist called Diana Deutsch in 1986,
and what she realised is that what we hear,
whether we hear it going up or whether we hear it going down,
very much depends on our culture, on our language. Oh, my God!
Yeah, the perception is probably going to be the same
as your parents, probably going to be the same
as people in the area that you live.
People who have a very much more musical language
will hear it differently from people who are rather straightforward
with their language. I think it's fascinating.
It'll tell you something about people,
just whether they say it's higher or lower.
That's fascinating, even in terms of what makes the sound of a joke,
how you play it, the sound of your voice in different cultures.
Can you hear a joke happening if you don't understand the language
and the rhythm of something
and what cadence works in different cultures? Yeah.
I'd love someone to tell my mum that,
because I've got a mum who's really desperate
to have somebody in our family who's really good
at any kind of instrument or anything.
So now I can tell her I am, because I do comedy.
Are you musical, Alan?
Not in the slightest.
He's drawn a lovely dick and balls, though,
so he is still artistic.
There are other auditory illusions.
Have a look at this picture and tell me what you hear.
Oh, isn't that weird?
What can you hear?
HE WHISPERS: I can't... I can't hear anything.
Anybody?
No, it's gone. Can't hear anything?
I heard it straight away... A little bit of wind?
..and then it went. What did you hear?
I don't know. But I heard noise... Like I heard... Like a thudding?
Yeah. Like... Like the landing. Yeah.
So, about 70% of people... I can hear that... Now I've said it again...
You can hear it? Yeah, now you've said it...
And now it's like it's happening,
because I'm looking at it and I feel it like it's around me.
About 70% of people who watch this hear a thudding sound when...
Oh, it's horrible cos it feels like you're next to it.
Yeah, it makes me queasy. But is it only your eyes telling your brain
something that would normally happen because of the movement?
It's completely silent. And if you close your eyes,
there's nothing there. Yeah, it's totally silent.
Right, let's nose around another question.
Hmm! Here's one.
OK, what do banks smell of?
Money.
It depends on the bank, is the truth of it.
It depends on what scent
they have decided to associate the bank with. Bank scent. Yeah.
Armpit. So it could be grapefruit, could be cardamom,
could be chocolate. I got driven here today in a car
by a driver who had an extraordinary amount of aftershave on,
and he was playing Smooth FM.
Oh. Oh. Did you fall in love? Honestly...
..I was quite in love.
It is always funny to listen to very emotional music
with someone you've just met. Yes.
Like, the late drive home and it's like...
# We weren't even married... # You're like...
LAUGHTER
# On my own. #
It's such a sad bit. Very intense!
You both are in your own world of failed relationships. Yeah!
It's like, "We'll go to the petrol station,
"get something to eat, shall we?"
When my... When my son was 18, he discovered aftershave.
And, er, oh, dear God!
He'd do the "psssh, psssh, psssh!"
And the whole house would smell of Lynx.
I still get such a visceral, like, sexy feeling
around the smell of Lynx. Mm.
Because for me, it's like being at a disco,
aged 16, like, Lynx was the smell the people you wanted smelled of,
like, you didn't want to smell something that smelled like a...
So he was using the right one at 18? Yeah. Yeah, that's the...
Oh. .."Wsssssh!" Yeah, and then you're like...
SHE YIPS
We're in the world of scent marketing.
So, environmental scenting.
It's the scent that is introduced
into a retail or a leisure environment.
It's really big business.
It makes you part with your money? It does, darling.
It works because it sends signals to our limbic system,
which is the sector of the brain that controls memory and emotion
and it absolutely works. The very first bank to try this
was the National Australia Bank headquarters in Melbourne,
and they introduced the scent of lime and grapefruit...
Oh! ..in 2012.
They're quite happy scents. Yes. Happy scents. Yeah.
And some high-end banks or sort of financial institutions
use signature scents that are supposed to lend
a sense of luxury to their clientele. Very nice.
One bank selected a premium fragrance
that begins with mouthwatering mandarin,
fresh, watery ozone
and green cardamom notes
supported by black pepper and musk.
Musk? Musk. That's lovely. I don't want that in a bank.
Do you want that in a bank? I don't want musk in a bank, no.
I don't want to get pregnant off the air in a bank.
LAUGHTER
Well, casinos have found,
depending on the scent that they use in the casino,
people will gamble more.
Wow. So, the Las Vegas Hilton found that people spent 50% more time
playing in the casino if there were floral smells.
I like the idea of quite a lot of rough gamblers going,
"Ooh, it's nice in here." Ooh.
I've been to Vegas casinos and people smoke in there.
There's still smoking? Yeah, in the casino.
I love a casino. I do.
Do you? Oh, God.
Oh, my God, Sandi. That's the most random fact!
I would never... Toksvig loves a casino.
She loves gambling. She goes in the roulette wheel.
Whoo-ooh-ooh!
"I'm going for 14. Wish me luck!"
"It's red, it's red, it's red!"
That is so funny. Oh, God.
So, Las Vegas, they all have different smells.
The Mirage is Polynesian, the Mandalay Bay is Southeast Asian
and the Bellagio -
whispers of northern Italy. Oh! I know.
And cigars and cigarette smoke, mainly. Yeah.
So, scent marketing is a thing.
Jewellers, gyms, dentists, funeral parlours,
all kinds of people use it now.
It's very popular in supermarkets, scent marketing.
So, in New York, for example, they have fresh bread
in the bread aisle, grapefruit in the fruit aisle, that kind of thing.
But it's not the only trick that supermarkets play.
Some supermarkets use smaller floor tiles
in front of the more expensive sections.
And the reason is, as you notice the clicking of your trolley wheels
is becoming faster,
you don't realise it's the tiles becoming smaller,
you instinctively slow down. You feel like you've sped up
cos you can hear the wheels kind of going like this.
You think it's going a bit too fast. Are any choices our own?
Absolutely nothing.
When we spray Lynx and we spray perfume, we're all, like,
doing the sell. Yeah. It's just like, who are we?
There's an amazing documentary called The Men Who Made Us Sell.
It was Sigmund Freud's nephew, I'm pretty sure, um,
kind of made it over, in post-World War Germany, to America
and started using many of the theories about people for,
for selling reasons. For marketing. For marketing.
And one of the big things he did was give...
So, women's rights had started, because people were like,
"Oh, they should have some."
"I'm still not on board yet, but we'll see."
And there were all these women marching
and they gave some of them some cigarettes,
so then the symbol of, like, a sort of sexy, progressive woman,
because they would sell them for pictures
and give them to women for free in the marches,
that became an iconic kind of image, and they were like, what...
And it's the penis, it's a phallus, and stuff like that,
and just, like...
I was with you right up until that. No, no, as in... But he...
He would have the thing of going, that whole thing of like...
It's on fire, the penis. It's on fire.
If it's any consolation.
No, but seriously, if you burn the tip of a penis, honestly,
that man will give you whatever you want.
The guy you're talking about is Edward Bernays. Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Right. Who is this man and what do his farts smell like?
Oh. Oh. Wow. This show's really gone downhill, I feel!
# I hear music...# Yes.
I really like that song.
He looks like his farts smell of,
like, a church.
Oh. What does a church smell of to you? Incense and...
..crime. Yeah!
It's a heady combination.
Rolling tobacco, I imagine he smells like.
His farts smell of chocolate. Do they?
And look how proud he is of it. I know.
So he's a French inventor called Christian Poincheval
and in 2017, he invented a pill, which he is showing there,
which he claims makes farts smell of chocolate.
He told a journalist he had been eating in a restaurant with friends
and he said, "Our farts were so smelly, we nearly suffocated.
"People at the table next to us were not happy.
Something had to be done.
Oh. It's nice to hear of a French person that isn't sexy, isn't it?
Just give one to every taxi driver.
"It's a long journey. Just have one of those."
He made other fart fragrances.
You can also have roses and violets. Most reviewers said
that they either made their farts stop smelling entirely
or stopped them from farting together,
and that's because the pills contain active charcoal,
basically charcoal with lots of pockets of air in it,
and that is known to remove smelly or impure substances.
Is that what we should put around the dog?
Um... You need some sort of absorbent dome around the dog.
Well, you can get fart-proof underwear.
For dogs? Wow. Well, I don't see any reason why a dog couldn't
have on a pair of underpants, and there are fart-proof underwear.
Is it just like a Covid mask in the bottom of your pants?
Yes, so there's a Colorado psychologist called Buck Weimer
and he invented anti-flatulence underwear
as a present for his wife.
Oh. Oh. Oh-ho-ho-ho!
Who says romance is dead, eh?
His ex-wife.
But I don't see why you couldn't get them for the dog, darling.
I think the dog might feel shamed. Mm.
To be honest with you,
I'm not looking to protect the dog's feelings.
Fart-proof underpants don't make scents.
Hey! Very good.
Right, this question is not as senseless as it sounds.
What kind of dog can tell the time?
# I hear music. #
A good boy.
A watchdog. Ay!
KLAXON SOUNDS
GROANING
I asked for it.
What about a CLOCKER spaniel?
KLAXON SOUNDS
There's no original thought left.
Who's got dogs? I've got a dog, you've got a dog, you've got a dog.
Well, have you ever noticed that when you get home,
your dog seems to be waiting for you?
How does the dog know what time it is?
It waits there all day, surely. They're like...
PANTING
No. Definitely, they don't do that. My dog, she would get up
and start yelling the place down before the doorbell rang,
so you could tell someone was approaching the property.
Sure, they can hear if somebody's approaching the property,
but how might they know what time it is?
Well, I'm probably going to say this wrong, but there's...
When they go to the toilet,
they put their bum to the sun, the south, always to the south.
I got told this quite recently, and it's...
Maybe... it's QI, cut it if it's wrong
but I think... I think it....
You want a show called Gullible.
The more I'm talking on it, the more I'm losing faith in it.
Well, there is some thought
that they do prefer to poo along the north-south axis,
and it's to do with magnetic fields, but...
Ooh! There we are. ..we don't know if that's true or not.
So, it might be your smell, is the thing.
Right. So it is not that you stink.
My smell? No, a human being's smell.
It's not your smell as you come up the path, or whatever.
After you leave the house, your scent lingers
and they have phenomenal sense of smell,
and it decays slowly over the day.
If you have a fairly regular schedule,
the dog will notice when your smell has declined to a certain level
that it associates with you coming home. Wow! Wow!
And then, if it disappears completely, it thinks you're dead.
And then, when you open the door,
it acts as if you've come back from the dead,
every time you come home. "Oh, my God! I thought you were dead!
"You were definitely dead!
"It's a miracle!"
There's a dog researcher called Alexandre Horowitz,
and what she did was, she tested this thing about the smell
by placing several fairly sweaty shirts from the dog's owner
around the house before the dog's owner was due to come back.
And the dog was not waiting by the door
because the smell was still strong in the house,
and therefore it didn't think
it must be time for the owner to be returning.
I mean, it could also be if you feed your dog at exactly the same time,
or your cats, then they know it's nearly dinner time
because they're beginning to get hungry.
If you have a dog, is a dog pleased to see your face when you come home?
Yes, my dog really is.
My dog levitates when I return.
It is frightening. Aw!
But it seems that the dogs
don't really have a part of the brain
that specifically responds to faces. Wow.
So, they did a study in Hungary of domesticated dogs,
and they showed them videos
of either the back or the front of a human head.
And first of all, they preferred dog videos to human videos.
Secondly, they didn't seem to care
if it was the back of the front of your head. Wow.
What part of a human does a dog recognise, then?
What part of you is it?
The smell. Well, I have to say this is one of the few times
where I would dispute something because I swear that my dog
can recognise emotion in my face.
But do you think that's actually your face
or that dogs can sense feelings more than it's your...
they know Sandi's feelings and ups and downs,
and it's not your...? It may well be that.
I mean, they certainly can read your emotions, I think.
Sometimes I get all three children and the dog,
all have left the room.
"He's going off. Let's go out."
They're all in another room like that together.
"Have you calmed down?"
"Sorry, everyone, sorry."
You know there's dogs who can now smell tumours or cancer in people.
But you don't want that in your dog! You come in and the dog was,
"Wow, OK... No, I'm not going to tell you. I'm not telling you."
"Er, do you want to know?"
"I'm not qualified, actually, to give the information."
"No, we can absolutely throw the ball. Enjoy life while I can."
I mean... Yeah, "Let's just enjoy today, shall we?"
Now it's time for our final sensory demonstration.
OK, so have a look at this.
Whoa.
It looks like a flat window with one end shorter than the other.
I'm just going to make sure that you guys can see this, like this.
It's called the Ames window.
I'm too short to do this sitting down.
So I'm going to spin it and just look at the effect that it has...
Oh, I don't like... ..when it's spinning.
Isn't it interesting? It appears to stop halfway.
It doesn't look like it's spinning all the way around.
Yeah, that's the thing. Oh! That is really weird. Oh!
I thought you weren't doing it then.
If you look at the thing, it's not spinning.
I thought you were getting ready to do it.
No, I'm spinning it all the way round,
but it appears to stop halfway and go back the other way. Oh!
Ohh! Oh! Oh!
My gosh!
Have a look at this. Put a pencil through the window.
You can stick things on or through the window
and then the objects appear to lift out of the window.
No way! What...
..the absolute...? Please.
Isn't it weird? Oh, it's so weird. I know.
So it's called the Ames window. It was invented by an American artist
and psychologist called Adelbert Ames and what it is
is that the brain knows what a window looks like.
We know what a window looks like.
It has equal sides.
And they've done this experiment
with people who are not used to Western architecture
and all they see is an irregular shape spinning.
We're seeing what we see as a window?
Yeah. It's the same - if you look at these two lines,
have a look and tell me which one is longer.
Oh, the top one looks longer.
You'd think the top one, but I'm sure that's...
The top one looks longer. But they're the same.
They're exactly the same length.
And it's only in the West that we see that the top looks longer
and if you test it on indigenous people in parts of Angola
and the Ivory Coast and so on, they don't see a difference in the length.
There's an amazing book by a chap called Will Storr
called The Science Of Storytelling
and it's all about our perception of stuff like that
and how the first thing you'll see
will be the most dangerous version of the thing it could be,
hence why sometimes if you see a shadow at the side of the road
that looks like a creepy man leaning into the road and then,
you get closer and realise it's a gatepost,
you see the creepy man to protect you
in case it is the worst possible thing
you have ever imagined before,
but only based on the things you've already ever imagined.
It's very like the auditory illusion we heard earlier,
it depends what language, what cultural context you've come from,
what you'll hear, whether you hear whether the note has gone up
or down, whether you think it's shorter or longer.
And if you look on the graph, you can see this is exactly the same.
My brain's still struggling to accept it. I'm counting the squares.
It's fascinating, isn't it? Right, cue lighting.
Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!
Ooh! Oh. Ooh.
What does the spotlight effect feel like?
It points out creeps in our presence.
LAUGHTER
That's not nice. What does that feel like? Well, it seems to be
the right answer, because they brought them back.
What does it feel like to...? I love it. You love it.
It reminds me being on stage, the only one in the room lit,
the only one anyone can hear. Go on, Alan. Dreamland.
Yes, yes, Alan, yes.
Darling, it's something that maybe you guys
are not the right people to test this on. Yeah. A bad focus group.
I imagine it's supposed to make you feel
a bit uncomfortable and self-conscious.
The spotlight effect is the name psychologists have given
to our tendency to dramatically overestimate
how much attention people are paying to us.
I don't think so, Sandi.
I don't think so.
In 2000, students were asked
to wear a bright yellow Barry Manilow T-shirt to a seminar.
In what year, sorry? In the year 2000. OK.
That's a really cruel experiment. It is.
He was described as a figure of dubious renown.
Ugh.
That's on his passport.
Among college students. Oh, so they...? Yeah.
Anyway, afterwards, the wearers of this T-shirt were asked
to estimate how many fellow students had noticed
that they were wearing this T-shirt,
and they overestimated by a factor of two.
So it's the spotlight effect. You think that people are looking at you
when, in fact, they're not really.
Well, maybe it means if you feel vulnerable that you can be seen,
you're more vulnerable to a predator. Hmm.
You know, if you're in a herd of antelope or something,
you're like, "Oh, I'm the only one they can see." Yes!
Because you're wearing a Barry Manilow T-shirt.
But of course, the cheetah in the long grass
doesn't know anything about Barry Manilow.
It's just trying to find the slowest, weakest one.
I mean, I'm really trying to make the science that I've got
match up with what you just said.
Does the spotlight effect always make us think it's something great
rather than it's something bad?
No, it's just, for example, if you contribute in an argument
in a group discussion, people almost always overestimate
the extent to which others have noted their contributions. Hmm.
And now I have a horrible sense of foreboding
that it's about to be General Ignorance. Yes, it is.
Fingers on buzzers, please.
Which composer was completely deaf by the time of their final work?
MUSIC: U Can't Touch This by MC Hammer
Beethoven.
KLAXON SOUNDS
Oh, God.
Beethoven is the one that we most think.
He was always thought to have been deaf at the end of his life.
It is popularly believed that he wrote
the ninth and final symphony, 1824,
and that he couldn't really hear it.
Now, we know his hearing did deteriorate, but there is some...
I love that there is still research happening and all these years later,
we might decide to change our minds about it.
He carried around something called conversation books
when his hearing deteriorated, in which his companions
could scribble their side of the conversation.
He also used them as sort of diary, writing reminders, shopping lists
like any other human being.
And there's a musicologist at the Kent State University in Ohio
called Theodore Albrecht, and he has spent decades translating
these conversation books into English and found 23 references
to Beethoven's hearing in the composer's writing around this time.
So, for example, in 1823, Beethoven wrote,
"Baths and country air could improve many things.
"Just do not use mechanical devices, ear trumpets too early.
"By abstaining from using them,
"I have fairly preserved my left ear this way."
And that is only a year before the Ninth Symphony.
So it's possible that we just were wrong.
Not only, according to Professor Albrecht,
was Beethoven not completely deaf at the premiere of his Ninth Symphony,
he could hear, although increasingly faintly,
for at least two years afterwards.
I love that we're like, "You weren't that good.
"You were only barely deaf."
You had the left ear, Beethoven, you had your left one.
That's the most Irish you'll ever be.
"Ah, but I heard he wasn't that deaf, like." Yeah.
Gabriel Faure, we could have gone for,
or Ralph Vaughan Williams.
Sadly, a deafness caused by the guns of World War I. Sorry?
I totally fell for it. Did you like that? Yeah, I remember it.
It's like having my dad here.
Beethoven could probably hear the cheers for his final symphony.
What did people in the Middle Ages do with their excrement?
# Trees of green. #
Look for magical stones in it.
Yes. Bezoars.
But then, throw it out of the window.
KLAXON SOUNDS
No? Not throw it out of the window?
But there's a picture of someone throwing it out of the window.
Well, this is actually an anecdote about King Louis IX of France.
And a student poured his pot, as it were,
out onto the king.
And you would have thought the king would be furious.
But the king, in fact, gave him a prebendary,
which is a remunerative post in a cathedral,
because he was so thrilled to see a young person up early
and going about their studies.
So you were not supposed to throw your excrement
out of the window. Apart from anything else,
everybody knew that human waste spread disease.
So they did not tip it into the street,
they poured it into the nearest river. And the rules were,
people were responsible for the cleanliness of the streets
outside their own houses.
In the 1300s, there was one man who was beaten to death
for dropping eel skins on the street, and the other people
didn't want to have to pay the fine. And larger houses had latrines.
And then they had something called a gong farmer,
somebody who came and emptied the latrine. There we are.
They're taking it off.
And towns usually provided public latrines.
They were known as places of easement.
Place of easement.
Those two lads. Yeah. Like, I'm doing a QI,
which is a beloved television show,
and I have not even dressed up as well as those two lads
going to empty the jacks.
That is bowler hats, waistcoat. Whole shebang.
You're probably going to get shit on you. Absolutely.
Gong farmers. Hats off to the gong farmers.
If you found something in the shit,
somebody had dropped coins or whatever, you got to keep it.
Yes! Lovely. That's nice.
I thought you were going to say they did, like,
tea readings with poo.
Some sort of like, "Ooh!" You know.
Where does the word "loo" come from?
Er, short for Lulu?
I mean... technically, that is correct.
It is short for Lulu.
Short for lavatory.
No. So, the story used to be that "loo" came from the phrase
"garde a l'eau" - meaning "watch out for the water" -
that people would shout as they emptied their chamber pot
into the street below.
Cannot be the case because, first of all, they didn't do that.
Didn't do it. And secondly, the first recorded use of the word "loo"
comes from 1922 in James Joyce's Ulysses.
It's probably from Waterloo, which was a company that made iron cisterns
in the 20th century.
Ahh. Wow.
The notion that people emptied their chamber pots out of the windows,
a load of, erm...
Anyway, moving on.
Where does the ukulele come from?
The ukulele case.
It comes from, erm...
..annoying people at house parties.
Yes, these are all truisms.
Colombia. Ireland.
Ireland?
No. We'd never do that to people.
I like that you're going like this. "Ireland..."
"Ahh." I was so impressed with myself
and then I realised I was wrong,
and I thought, "Just hold it..."
LAUGHTER
AISLING: Is it Honolulu?
ROISIN: Ooh. What state is that in?
Ahh. I'm not going to tell you, Sandi,
because I don't want to patronise you. Hawaii. Hawaii.
KLAXON SOUNDS
That's terrible. It was invented in Madeira,
which is a Portuguese island off the coast.
Oh, wow. That's not fair because they set us up
with a gentleman's shirt,
the little hummingbird, the flower.
That is because it is associated with Hawaii.
It was first brought to Hawaii
by a migrant Portuguese worker named Joao Fernandez in 1879.
It's originally called braginho, which is a Portuguese word for it.
It was the Hawaiians who renamed it ukulele,
and it translates as "jumping flea"
after the way the fingers kind of leap about on the fingerboard.
Right, at what time of day are you most likely to hear
a cock crowing? Oh.
MUSIC: U Can't Touch This by MC Hammer
Soon as I bat my eyelashes.
KLAXON SOUNDS
How did they know?
They are, people think, famous for crowing at first light of day.
Actually, they crow all bloody day, sometimes at night as well.
They do often crow at or just before dawn,
but basically, they then keep going.
So, in the olden days... The olden days.
..which is exactly the type of historical accuracy
people are watching QI for...
..when farmers were all reliant on the cock crowing
to know when to get up, were they all just up all the time,
just having the occasional hour-long nap like newborn babies?
Were they just getting dressed 18 times a day?
The interesting thing is that they seem to know it's dawn,
not because it's light,
but because their internal body clock tells them. So they've done tests
where they've kept them in sort of dimly lit rooms,
and they still start crowing at exactly the same time each day,
so you can rely on them to wake you.
It's perfectly fine.
It's one of the few creatures that could swallow its own brain.
What? What?
Look at the size of its mouth.
And its brain has got to get into that tiny head.
Oh, if you fed it its own brain? If you got it out,
it could eat its own brain.
Anyway, they're not crowing because it's light,
they're crowing for all sorts of reasons.
Warnings, territorial claims, showing dominance,
tell other cocks they've just mated. Woo!
You know. Ah! Their crows are really, really loud.
It's an average of 100 decibels, if you're standing within a few feet.
That's about the same as a chainsaw.
Or it could be as much as 143 decibels.
So human eardrums rupture at 150 decibels.
So why don't cockerels deafen themselves?
Haven't got any ears. No, that's not... Oh, actually,
why would they be bothering telling their mates about the...
Why would they bother? Jess's head is like Sherlock now.
"But of course..." Yeah. This is shrinking my brain to the point
where I could eat it.
They have an in-built system
to prevent their hearing getting damaged.
It is amazing. Half of the bird's eardrum
is covered by bit of soft tissue that dampens the noise.
And also, when they tilt their head back to crow,
another bit of material covers the ear canal completely
and serves as a built-in ear defender.
Oh, so a little bit of minor surgery and they'd shut up.
Yeah.
Well, the bit nobody talks about is, why haven't the hens gone deaf?
Oh. Oh, they're all in the corner, like...
"Shut it! Shut it!"
If you hear a cock crow, it might be morning
or he might have just got lucky.
Let's hear the scores and see if they feel smelly or tasty.
In last place, with a sense of shame, frankly,
with minus... Wow. Minus 36.
Aisling. No! What? How?
APPLAUSE
With a sense of humour, in joint second place with minus 18,
it's Roisin and Jessica.
APPLAUSE
And with a sense of purpose, with minus seven, it's Alan.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
Thanks, Roisin, Aisling, Jessica and Alan.
I leave you with this sign-off from Steve Martin
about his sense of smell.
"I cannot smell mothballs
"because it's so difficult to get their little legs apart."
Goodnight.