We're not sure about this one.  Has anybody done the calculations?  Are electric hand dryers actually greener than using paper towels?

We put this to Dr Ian Cross:

A whole variety of reasons but music does seem to have profound affective effects.  That is, it works deeply on our emotions.  Daniel Levitin was talking previously about some ways in which limbic centres in the brain are activated by experiencing music. A lot of this probably depends on prior experience. You probably wouldn’t be moved to tears by hearing either of those two previous clips [Ndroje balendro and Wonga].

Chris: I was! Ian: For thirty-six hours, perhaps. But you could be moved to tears simply on the basis of association between a piece of music and a particular episode of your life and a particular previous position or preference to use a particular type of music to do things like move yourself to tears.Chris: It’s stimulating a memory which is itself associated with some emotion and that’s why it’s making you feel happy or sad. Ian: Most likely.

We put this to Dr Ian Cross:

Hmm. Not terribly certain about that. I suspect that there is evidence that there is some musically central or rhythmic structures, tempi, if you like. There are certain structures that one can link into, one can entrain one’s attentional pulse/attentional periodicities to.  As to whether or not it requires it to be shamanic in order to happen, it’s not a matter.

We put this question to Dr Ian Cross:

Ian: Er, probably not. Other than, "assume the crash position!"

Chris: Wasn’t there some tests done by the American military?Ian: Yeah.  The trouble is with sound, it leaks out so it would be difficult to prevent the same thing happening to your own soldiers were it to have been efficacious.  The other thing about sound, it does this wonderful thing.  You can diminish the effect by standing further away.  This as a strategy doesn’t appear to have been something envisaged by those who were trying to test it.

It’s a great question.  Thanks very much for that and actually something that I (Helen) have looked at myself.  It is not maybe wrinkles but patterns that animals have, that fish have on their faces and the ability to actually identify individuals.  I did a study of a huge fish called the humphead wrasse or Maori wrasse, which are beautiful big reef creatures by taking photographs of their patterns, beautiful patterns.  They’re called Maori wrasse because they look a bit like the tattoos that New Zealand indigenous people have on their faces.  I could actually identify individual fish and look at when they were coming to mate and how they were aggregating in one particular area.  I think yes absolutely, fish can have these identifiable features on them.  I don’t know about wrinkles.

The other thing we have with things like whales and dolphins is that lots of things grow on them: barnacles and little bits of creatures and things like that.  People doing population assessments can also count whales by taking photographs of their tails and the nooks and crannies they have on their huge flukes as they come up to dive, and that can help you to identify how many you’ve got in a population.

We put this question to Dr Ian Cross:

Two possible reasons: there is some evidence that people suffering from Asperger’s syndrome may be aurally hyper-sensitive.  I think a more plausible reason is likely to be that listening to something someone else has created is not something you can control whereas if you are producing it yourself it obviously is. It’s likely to be a control issue.

We put this question to Professor David Howard:

Well, when we listen to sounds like speech we’ve of course learnt about speech and we’ve had experiences in our lives that link to sound. We’ve learnt the patterns of certain speech and it’s associated with certain things. If you’ve heard speech from other people from your past, perhaps your mum or your dad or a loved one you’re picking up those patterns in other people. It just triggers memories.

Chris: If we find someone intensely annoying to listen to, not just the content of what they are saying but the way they sound because we all know people like that, people have certain laughs. Why do we find certain voices intensely annoying?David: My guess is again that it is some sort of conditioning back to some sort of experience in early life. Perhaps it was a teacher who told you off or whatever that made you pick up that particular pattern. So it’s another stored pattern, it’s a memory.

The reason for this is because spearmint contains menthol.  Menthol triggers the same receptor as cold.  It's something called the TRP-M8 receptor or nerve fibres in the mouth.  It fools them into thinking they’re colder than they really are.  So when you breathe in, your mouth feels colder than it really is because it’s activated this particular ion channel in the surface of the nerve fibre in your mouth.  You think things are a lot colder than they really are.  It’s just a trick, a neurological trick, so you’re not any colder really.