In one-on-one Olympic competitions like boxing, tae kwon do, and wrestling, one competitor is assigned blue and the other is given red. They then box, kick, or grapple. With many events and many weight classes, you’d expect that blue would beat red as often as red beats blue. But that’s not the case. In the 2004 Athens Olympics the competitor in red won in 57 percent of all tae kwon do matches. In boxing, red won 55 percent, and in wrestling, red won 53 percent of freestyle and 52 percent of Greco-Roman matches.
Think Alabama Crimson Tide, Manchester United, St. Louis Cardinals, Detroit Red Wings. Yes, think Michael Jordan.
All of these teams have a psychological edge over their opponents every time they step onto the field, court, or ice.
But why does red win?
One idea is the chicken-and-the-egg hypothesis that at one point a good team happened to wear red and other wannabe good teams copied their uniform.
But much more fun is to think that red actually weakens the opposition by signaling dominance (as it does in the animal world) or by disrupting rational thought (like a stop sign). Or maybe referees favor red.
To test this last theory, researchers at the University of Münster in Germany showed taped tae kwon do matches to a group of certified referees. Then they switched the color of the competitors’ trunks and showed the exact tapes again. The verdict: The referees awarded the red-trunked competitor 13 percent more points than their blue-trunked rival, despite scoring exactly the same moves for each fighter.
Eye Hack: Black and White in Color
The setup for this eye hack is a bit involved, but totally worth it. Copy and cut this pattern. Attach it to a CD or DVD. Spin the disc and look closely at the pattern. What do you see? (Or you can glue it to a spinning top.) Black and white should become color, though everyone sees different colors. If you can’t see colors, you might have optic neuritis, an inflammation of the optic nerve.
Because the temporal lobe is the seat of emotion, seizure can also bring intense feelings of euphoria, fear, or … rapture. A 2003 study published in the journal Epilepsy & Behavior describes the frequency of immediate religious conversion of people experiencing temporal lobe seizures.
What would the world be like today had Emperor Constantine—whose conversion and subsequent evangelism of the Roman empire followed a trembling vision of bright light—been quickly treated with a smelly shoe?