Last night Richard Wiseman -- "Britain’s only chair in the Public Understanding of Psychology" -- spoke at Town Hall about his study of quirkology. Which, if you don't know, is the study of the offbeat in human behavior as a way of shining light on why we act the way we do. Here's a short recap of what we learned about:

>>Speed dating: He didn't get into this in the talk, but it sounded interesting, so we looked the speed-dating experiment up. The findings were:

• It takes just 30 seconds for the more impulsive half of women to decide if a guy is datable or not. Only 20% of men had formed an opinion in that time.
• Women were twice as picky as men.
• Travel is better to talk about on a date than movies -- men and women tend to have different tastes in movies.
• The best opening lines offered the other person a chance to talk about themselves in a novel, not-told-a-hundred-times-before way. Cliches and attempts to impress were turn-offs.

>>Luck. Many human quirks have to do with stress narrowing our field of attention. Wiseman studied self-reported extremely lucky and unlucky people, and found that "lucky" people were more holistic with their attention, less narrow-focused. When an opportunity arose, they could spot it. "Unlucky" people tended to get nervous and have tunnel vision. Given the task of counting the number of photos in a newspaper, they missed half-page text ads that said "Stop counting -- there are 52 photos total" and "Tell the experimenter you saw this ad and you'll win $100." In life, of course, no one tells them they missed things -- they end up believing breaks just never come their way.

>>Lying. "Children are miniature lying machines." In experiment to see if a child would lie for no particular reason, 40% of three-year-olds did, beat handily by the 100% of 5-year-olds. Despite popular belief about shifty eyes and sweaty palms, the best way to tell is someone is lying is to listen. Liars tend to use shorter sentences, make fewer self-references, have a lower emotional tone to their statements, and won't make the kind of unimportant, automatic corrections we normally make in conversation ("Tues -- no, Wednesday"). People's ability to detect liars is worst on TV, better with newspapers, and best on radio.

>>Counterfactual beliefs. People jump to unsupported beliefs from bad evidence all the time. We make shit up incessantly, and act on it. Research indicated that firewalking was possible because not much heat was being transferred over 10 or 15 steps. Wiseman got a group of firewalkers together to walk a much longer fire trench -- all of whom believed they were summoning up a protective energetic field -- and watched them all bail out halfway with second-degree burns. (For fun, find/replace "firewalkers" with "neocons" and "fire trench" with "Iraq.")

>>Limited bandwidth. In general, too much detail confuses us -- Wiseman (wearing a political consultant hat) offered that in a televised debate, facial competence predicts success. Because people are always looking for shortcuts, the more "reliable-looking" candidate could unleash a blizzard of factual-sounding details and when people gave up trying to follow it all, could count on them simply weighing if he or she looked more "presidential."

>>You're no different. The "Count the basketball passes" video worked on the majority of the Town Hall crowd, and everyone watched "The Colour-Changing Card Trick" (a YouTube hit) without the faintest clue that we were missing anything.

It was an unusual talk because Wiseman is also a magician, and began by disappearing and reappearing a red handkerchief, did a card trick, and later on illustrated how a French drop works, pointing out that where a magician looks is where the audience is almost compelled to look. If the magician did a trick perfectly, but looked at the floor instead of his flourishing hand, we'd look at the floor too.

Wiseman is half-high-speed-presenter and half-comedian ("Thank you for restraining the applause," he added after his first trick), and went big on show-and-tell, less so with the in-depth detail on "why" that Seattle audiences lap up. We'd have liked to hear more about the attentional deficits themselves and how and why they affect us, but maybe next time.