When she got the call about the prize that she had won, Eleanor McGuire was almost offended.

The year was 2000. McGuire was a neuroscientist who had recently published an interesting paper. Maybe you've heard about it.

In London, cab drivers have to pass a grueling exam to get a license. It tests their knowledge of every

single road in the city, every crooked lane, every obscure byway, every paved over cowpath

dating back hundreds of years. 25,000 streets. McGuire wondered if this changed the driver's brain

somehow, particularly the hippocampus,

a place associated with memory.

So she scanned the cabby's brains, and sure enough, their hippocampi were far larger than normal,

like they were on steroids.

It was a fascinating discovery.

And, as McGuire found out that day in 2000, it won her

a prize. But it seemed more like a booby prize. The award was called the Ig Nobel Prize, a cheeky

reference to the regular Nobel's. As its motto says, the goal of the Ig Nobel Prize is to highlight research that

first makes you laugh, then makes you think. It's somewhat controversial. Although it focuses

on the absurd side of science, it often touches on surprisingly important topics, but it also

sometimes touches a nerve with winners. Not everyone appreciates the joke.

So today, we are going to explore the Ig Nobel's and what makes them unique.

Ultimately, Eleanor McGuire turned down her prize in 2000.

But over the years, the Ig Nobel's have become a fixture in the scientific community,

a bizarro counterpart of the sometimes stuffy Nobel Prize. And along the way, the Ig Nobel's have

even earned the last thing that their founder ever expected, a modicum of respect.

From the Science History Institute, this is Sam Keene and the Disappearing Spoon, a topsy, turvy, sciencey history podcast, where footnotes become the real story.

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