Do Your Own Research!

Dear Mayor Moore,

Have you been on a Sunday cycle through Rosebery lately? Have you gotten to the end of your trip and found your fingers jittery, shaky? And have you thought back on your traversal to figure out why you might be shaking and come across nothing in your memory but a blank, empty void of experience? No? Well, many local cyclists are suffering this subliminal stress, a stress they likely pin on the pandemic itself, but they couldn’t be more wrong. Boy, have I got news for you. And I’m going to give it for free.

Throughout this lockdown and post dismissal from my previous accounting job, I’ve taken up non-for-profit freelance research (which you’re welcome to donate to by the way [my focus is community impact studies at the moment] but no pressure in donating, obviously). A few months back I self-published a paper on Amazon’s e-book store detailing the findings of my study entitled, A Relationship Between Observation, Stress and Cognition, in which I quantified a person’s ability to detect under differing levels of pressure. In short, I played the card game Snap with my niece several times over and found that I actually made mistakes (a rarity for me). I slapped the stack of cards even when there wasn’t a match because—get this—my brain was generalising the visuals, processing only vague blotches of image. Conversely, when I played the same game of Snap by myself, when I wasn’t stressing (evidenced by my drop in heart rate which my wife measured with a stopwatch and fingers pressed to my jugular), I noticed a greater level of detail on the cards, the little swirl of the J♣ moustache, the sword in the head of K♦, the profile aspect of the K♥, even the grid-like texture on the cards themselves. With a bit of logic, reasoning and extrapolation, I discovered there is a parabolic correlation between the number of visual details noticed in an environment and a person’s level of stress.

Pretty startling, huh? Especially when you consider how much money goes into psychological research these days. You’d think that with all their funding they would’ve found a relationship as simple as this decades ago, right? But no, it took a small-time, underfunded, sole trader/scientist to figure this one out. Proof of my research ability, I think.

The link is, of course, causational. As I note in my paper, when a large portion of our available cognitive capacity is being spent on a single stimulus (e.g. my niece’s hand as she flips a card), we have little leftover to spend on observation. And, of course, it is the noticed details that relax us, ground us, settle our minds because details take us out of our own heads (where stress exists) and into the real. 

It’s all been checked by the way, this paper, peer reviewed by my wife and niece and sister who is a ridgy-didge scientist and all, has her masters I think. You’re welcome to go over it yourself if you like, welcome to purchase for just $79 using the discount code MAYORMOORE on the Amazon store. But now, what I was getting to, how this relates to Rosebery’s cycleways: the bike paths are terribly narrow, you see.

They’re somehow squeezed between the footbath and the road along which cars love to parallel park. And they’re approximately the width of my handlebars, approximately the width of an open car door, such that if you were to ride these paths every day (which I pretty much do), being car-doored is an inevitability. It’s terrifying, I’ll admit. When riding, I’m plagued by visions of my top teeth chipping off on a metal doorframe, or having the bridge of my nose cave in. But this fear is not the real reason for the stress of local cyclists (well, it could be, but that’s not the conclusion I trying to draw here so I’m going to ignore that for now), rather, the stress comes from the lack of details noticed when cycling, a thing which results from the high cognitive input required to avoid potential door collisions.

How did I happen upon this bike path stress? You might ask. Well, as a freelance researcher/scientist, I’ve always got a few studies running in parallel. Currently, I’m collecting data on modes of transport (data specific to our community, a community which I hope to aid and hope to aid better in future when I get some funding). Specifically, I’m quantifying the level of detail I notice when I traverse our suburbs in different ways. After each outing, when I’ve travelled by foot or bike or scooter or car, I’ll spend ten minutes or so listing the things that I noticed in a big Google Sheet (I’d prefer Microsoft Excel, but can’t afford it at the moment). I might jot down general details like, an electric-blue bolt of lightning, the amount of water in the canal, a traffic control guy or the smell of fresh banana bread on Birmingham St. My notes might include interactions I’ve had: the guy smoking on his balcony made eye contact with me, two successive Deliveroo drivers on mopeds passed and cursed the traffic, a group of kids stopped at an intersection and waved at me across the road. And where my memory is clearer, I’ll go into specifics: during near-gale conditions an employee of Sushi Train used a leaf blower to clear (unsuccessfully) her shop’s portion of pavement of leaf litter; a bald man standing alone on the mulch of a public garden bed removed his golfing hat and replaced it with a transparent green plastic bag filled with 300 g of ice. These are the things I observe when out, genuinely. Notice how rigorous I am.

Even though this project is stalled at the moment due to underfunding (which, again, you’re welcome to help with [even a small $1 k would assist]), I’m planning to incorporate cycleway stress in the analysis because it is these community-specific investigations that have the most impact, and it’s all interrelated, really. Like, stress is a function of details noticed, and details noticed is a function of cognitive effort and velocity. The times at which we generalise are when we’re concentrating hard and travelling fast (so says my current hypothesis). A pilot controlling plane during takeoff might observe a tiny orange dot in his periphery, where a person driving a car will identify the orange dot as a traffic controller in a fluorescent vest, and a cycler will see that the traffic controller has a handlebar moustache, and a pedestrian will notice the crumbs of biscotti caught there. This is why babies in prams are always so wide-eyed and interested in the world—all of their cognitive effort can be put towards observation because they don’t steer and their velocity is low. Prams are thus the most relaxant form of transport. If only we could all regress to infancy.

Obviously, the relationship looks a bit like this:

f(D) = f(C) · f(v)

where D is details noticed, C is available cognitive power, v is velocity and f(v) looks something like:

f(v) = 1 – v/(v + 12)

and f(C) has components including Arousal, Intention, Perception and some Involuntary Context Bias, like socio-economic demographic and such, but this is all probably over your head so I won’t go into it further, but just know that I’m always very thorough with my research, okay (when I have the time and money).

Look, Mayor Moore, this letter isn’t a petition to have the bike paths removed or upgraded or left alone. It is merely free provision of advice because I’m concerned about my community. What I want is to use your platform to share my game-changing discovery. I want the local therapists to know the root cause of their clients’ stress. I want the local universities to acknowledge my studies for once and use it as a springboard for further research. I want the general populace to have free access to this knowledge, and if they like it, maybe they can help fund my current paper and future endeavours. Mayor Moore, they deserve to know, and my tiny platform of fifty Facebook friends is not big enough to share it.

Anyway, I hope you are well. If you’re planning on putting this info in a community newsletter, it might be helpful to add my contact details for those with questions, and add a link to my Paypal for those inclined to donate. Hopefully this letter has given you some confidence in my rigorous methodologies. 

Sincerely,

Joe L. Baker.