Figure 1. Sleep deprivation experiments on junior high school students testing the effects of clothes on lunch table preference. An experimental group was dressed in "Glam-Rock" clothing and deprived of sleep. The two control groups were allowed to dress as they pleased, and one group was also not allowed to sleep. After one week the "Glam-Rock" look had become a fad, and both control groups chose to dress that way. During the early mornings it became common among control group students to dress up in various ways and laugh uncontrollably. There was significant integration between groups at the lunch table. The only ostracized group consisted of students who had begun to have bizarre hallucinations and psychotic reactions to sleeplessness. These students comprised over half of the experimental group and about a third of the deprived control group. During the "talent show" at the end of the week, several near-riots ensued, led by some of the more hypo-manic student performers.

Figure 2. Interactive three-dimensional picture phone sex and long-distance relationships. Special attachments to ordinary 3-d picture phones allowed distant partners to transmit and receive various kinds of genital, oral, and anal stimulation in sync with the image and sound. Only some of the couples surveyed reported improvement in long-distance sexual relationships. Most said the service discouraged monogamy by providing convenient sex with little commitment. Many complained of prank calls, and some admitted to having made them. One of the major complaints about the system was that the luminescence of the 3-d video screen failed to create the right kind of atmosphere for sexual encounters. A number of couples disconnected their monitors or put the lens caps on their cameras. Some couples used invisibility as a further source of arousal by creating "voyeur" and "blind partner" roles. A small percentage complained of the limited sadomasochistic applicability of the attachments. In general, most of the people surveyed enjoyed the service, but found that it had no significant effect on the quality of their long-distance relationships.

Figure 3. The effect of cuteness on military training. A design group was asked to come up with cute versions of typical military equipment. Cute little machine guns, grenades, rocket launchers, tanks, missiles, and planes were constructed. The cute weapons were colored in pastel shades of pink, purple, and blue, and most were embroidered with floral patterns or forest scenes. Cute military uniforms were also made, colored in a similar fashion and trimmed with delicate fringes of lace. Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles equipped with thermo-nuclear MIRV warheads were placed on tasteful doilies. In addition to the various formal alterations, cute military equipment was imbued with a spirit of goofiness; the purple heart medallion was replaced by a yellow smiley face pin, and rank insignia were replaced by various "hello kitty" characters. Helmets were made to look like smurf hats. Training manuals were rewritten with additional occurrences of the word "smurf." Privates and officers trained with cute equipment were found to have significantly improved performances on various military tests. The improvement was also strongly correlated with age; younger students trained in cute settings outperformed older ones. Cutely-trained infantrymen displayed significantly better marksmanship than their counterparts in the non-cute control group; though the control group did better when presented with cute targets. The cute group had a better overall safety record and repaired cute equipment more reliably. The implications of this study are obvious. We need a younger, cuter military. It has been suggested that the optimal age for a soldier is three.

Figure 4. Electric guitar solos as treatment for major affective disorders. Jimi Hendrix treatments had to be discontinued when it became clear that they were exacerbating depressive and manic conditions. Several suicides seem to have been triggered by recordings of live Hendrix solos. Treatments in which patients were played recordings of guitar solos from songs by Journey and B. B. King were found to have mood-altering effects comparable to drugs in the benzodiazapine family, such as Valium and Klonopin. Electroencephalograms of sleep patterns in depressed patients for whom guitar solo treatment worked tended to strongly resemble patterns of notes found in "licks" common to the solos they were exposed to. In addition, random eye movement graphs displayed a significantly guitar-shaped distribution when processed through connectionist computational pattern-matching systems. Interviews with patients who remembered their dreams indicated that the content of the dreams included fantasies of being, or having sex with, rock guitarists. Treatments involving live guitar solos played by musicians in the mental ward of the hospital were far less effective than their recorded counterparts. The musicians hired often complained that they were "bummed out" by the hospital atmosphere, which affected their playing. Several of the musicians, upon being interviewed, were found to have major affective disorders and were subsequently admitted to the hospital. Recordings of accordion solos were found to elicit paranoid and psychotic reactions as well as amplifying existing affective symptoms.

Figure 5. The natural look of wood-grain. Voting preferences among professional clowns were found to strongly favor candidates who used wood-grain imagery in their campaign advertisements. In one experiment, pictures of the candidates in the various mock elections were always shown with high-resolution digitized wood-grain texture-mapped onto photorealistic three-dimensional computer models of their facial features. A composite facial model of all the winning candidates was constructed, and the clowns were asked to compare it to various wallpaper samples, including floral patterns, wood-grain, op art, and superheros. Most of the clowns selected the wood-grain samples as most similar to the composite candidate. The composite losing candidate was judged to be most similar to the op-art samples. In each of the 65 mock elections, each of the 123 clowns attended mock Democratic and Republican conventions and viewed two hours of television commercials (3/7 devoted to the "Republican" candidate, 3/7 devoted to the "Democratic" candidate, and 1/7 to an "independent" candidate.) Candidates whose parties met in convention halls with the natural look of wood-grain tended to win. Write-in votes for the independent party increased signifcantly when its advertisements featured the natural look of wood-grain. In twelve of the elections, the independent party was called the "wood party," and ran on a platform of increased support for loggers. In each case, the wood party's candidate won by a landslide victory; even when the candidate was played by a Nixon lookalike, an unpopular choice in other elections. Candidates and parties which were given a metallic look faired poorly in comparison to wood-grain hopefuls. In the 65 control elections (in which the parties were all given the same look) it was found that the professional clowns were predominantly non-republican. The clowns were a more-or-less random sample of comic acrobatic circus performers ranging from rookie to journeyman status. The seven candidates in the control and experimental groups of elections who were given a "ringleader" look lost every time.