To understand meetings of minds, scientists should study brains in the wild
Usually, scientific research papers appeal to their readers with results or ideas, not art. But as I was poking through some journals last week, an outlier caught my eye. Instead of the normal bland tables, bar graphs and trend lines, the first illustration in this paper looked more like a frat boy’s Facebook page the day after a rowdy throwdown.
Drunken party pictures are featured as Figure 1 in the paper. Partiers mill around a snack table (though the bottles of booze didn’t seem to leave much room for the food); a photobomber smiles mischievously in the background as a woman poses for the camera; a man looks out from the shadow of his empty martini glass.