¿Por qué tosemos más en los conciertos de música clásica? - BBC Mundo - Noticias - 0 views
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Todo está en silencio. Los instrumentos de cuerda, los de viento y percusión esperan la señal del director para empezar la pieza. Al otro lado está el público callado, tragando más espeso y conteniendo la tos. Hay alguien que no lo puede evitar y con el primer acorde empieza a toser. ¿Por qué siempre ocurre esto?
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"Toda la estadística existente sugiere que la gente tose dos veces más durante los conciertos", le dijo Wagener a la BBC.
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El especialista descubrió que la acción de toser no es completamente aleatoria. La pieza que se escucha también incita a toser más o menos.
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I realize that this article is in Spanish, so those who don't understand the language will likely be confused, but I thought that it was very interesting, and related to TOK. Essentially, the article talked about a study that Andreas Wagener, a German scientist did, in which it was discovered that people cough twice as much at classical music concerts than otherwise. Wagener also found that the amount of coughing was not random; rather, it was dependent on the style, tempo, etc. of the music being played. The slow, more modern pieces often elicited more coughs. Additionally, Wagener found that, similar to how we think about yawning, coughing is contagious; one cough can cause an avalanche of other coughs. The article also noted the possibility that some of the coughing going on during a classical music concert may not be the typical, involuntary, reflexive cough, but a deliberate cough of social interaction. In terms of TOK, I thought that this article was most interesting in that, when put into a situation in which we may be uncomfortable (often with silence), we cough more. I related this to my own experiences at Friends, during MFW, when people often seem to cough out of a need for interaction. It would be interesting to see if Wagener could work with some geneticists and biologists to discover if a connection between slow classical music and more coughing is purely biological, or if it stems from another causation of human behavior.