Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccuping, and Beyond by Robert Provine, professor of psychology, was reviewed in the UK’s Times Higher Education on November 15.
“Provine fearlessly explores the borderlands of scientific experimentation by studying these non-verbal outputs of the body, these behaviours that hardly any funding agency would consider serious subjects for enquiry and that would barely elicit interest beyond the Ig Nobel Prize judges. Incidentally, Provine surely deserves an Ig Nobel, because those awards are given for research that first makes people laugh and then makes them think. That is exactly what he has been doing for most of his scientific career, and that is probably what we should do here: laugh first and then think.”
The full review can be read here. Previous coverage of the book and Provine’s work can be found here.